  Robotic-assisted surgery is now well-established in clinical practice and has
become the gold standard clinical treatment option for several clinical
indications. The field of robotic-assisted surgery is expected to grow
substantially in the next decade with a range of new robotic devices emerging
to address unmet clinical needs across different specialities. A vibrant
surgical robotics research community is pivotal for conceptualizing such new
systems as well as for developing and training the engineers and scientists to
translate them into practice. The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), an academic and
industry collaborative effort to re-purpose decommissioned da Vinci surgical
systems (Intuitive Surgical Inc, CA, USA) as a research platform for surgical
robotics research, has been a key initiative for addressing a barrier to entry
for new research groups in surgical robotics. In this paper, we present an
extensive review of the publications that have been facilitated by the dVRK
over the past decade. We classify research efforts into different categories
and outline some of the major challenges and needs for the robotics community
to maintain this initiative and build upon it.
