A V-REP Simulator for the da Vinci Research Kit Robotic Platform

In this work we present a V-REP simulator for the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). The simulator contains a full robot kinematic model and integrated sensors. A robot operating system (ROS) interface has been created for easy use and development of common software components. Moreover, several scenes have been implemented to illustrate the performance and potentiality of the developed simulator. Both the simulator and the example scenes are available to the community as an open source software.