da Vinci Surgical System / da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK)

Intuitive Surgical's leader-follower minimally invasive surgical robot, with dVRK its retired hardware turned open research platform.

The da Vinci Surgical System, made by the American company Intuitive Surgical, is the dominant minimally invasive surgical robot: a surgeon sits at a console viewing a 3D endoscope feed and moves master controllers, while robotic arms at the patient's bedside reproduce the motion at scale, a form of leader-follower teleoperation. The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) is a research platform built starting in 2012 by Johns Hopkins University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Intuitive Surgical: retired da Vinci arms and master controllers are fitted with open-source electronics, firmware, and software and integrated with ROS, and it is now deployed at more than 40 institutions worldwide. It lets researchers read and write joint data directly and record surgical demonstrations, making it a common testbed for surgical automation, teleoperation interfaces, and imitation learning on surgical scenes.

ExampleTeams at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have recorded suturing and needle-passing demonstrations on the dVRK, then used imitation learning to train policies that perform these sub-tasks autonomously.

Also called

dVRK, da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit

Related

Surgical Robot · Teleoperation · Leader-Follower Teleoperation · Imitation Learning · Robot Operating System

Sources

The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) - Intuitive Foundation
What is the dVRK? — dVRK documentation