Software Architecture of the Da Vinci Research Kit

The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) has been installed at over 25 research institutions across the world, forming a research community sharing a common open-source research platform. This paper presents the dVRK software architecture, which consists of a distributed hardware interface layer, a real-time component-based software framework, and integration with the Robot Operating System (ROS). The architecture is scalable to support multiple active manipulators, reconfigurable to enable researchers to partition a full system into multiple independent subsystems, and extensible at all levels of control.