dVRK-XR: Mixed Reality Extension for da Vinci Research Kit

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) has become a widely adopted research platform for surgical robotics research since its initial public release in 2012. To date, it has been installed at 35 institutes worldwide. In the past decade, research interest in mixed reality (including augmented reality and virtual reality) has increased among both the robotics and medical communities [1], due to the improved usability of mixed reality headsets and the much reduced hardware cost. In this paper, we describe dVRK-XR (https://github.com/jhu-dvrk/dvrkxr), an extension to the dVRK open source package that facilitates the integration of mixed reality in surgical robotics research.