SCIENCE ROBOTICS | MEDICAL ROBOTS A decade retrospective of medical robotics research from 2010 to 2020 Pierre E. Dupont1 *, Bradley J. Nelson2 , Michael Goldfarb3 , Blake Hannaford4 , Arianna Menciassi5 , Marcia K. O’Malley6 , Nabil Simaan3 , Pietro Valdastri7 , Guang-Zhong Yang8 Robotics is a forward-looking discipline. Attention is focused on identifying the next grand challenges. In an applied field such as medical robotics, however, it is important to plan the future based on a clear understanding of what the research community has recently accomplished and where this work stands with respect to clinical needs and commercialization. This Review article identifies and analyzes the eight key research themes in medical robotics over the past decade. These thematic areas were identified using search criteria that identified the most highly cited papers of the decade. Our goal for this Review article is to provide an accessible way for readers to quickly appreciate some of the most exciting accomplishments in medical robotics over the past decade; for this reason, we have focused only on a small number of seminal papers in each thematic area. We hope that this article serves to foster an entrepreneurial spirit in researchers to reduce the widening gap between research and translation. INTRODUCTION Just more than three decades ago, the first roboticists began to explore the use of robot manipulators for performing surgical procedures. Two decades ago, the first commercial systems were installed in hospitals. In the past decade, the field of medical robotics has gained momentum, and thousands of robotic surgical systems are now installed in clinics around the world, and many millions of procedures have been performed. As the acceptance of surgical robots by our health care systems has become clear, robotics researchers have increasingly focused their attention on what the next generation of medical robots might look like. Their attention is not limited to surgical robots, and other areas of medicine are also being investigated, including robots to perform physical rehabilitation, telepresence robots for patient interaction with off-site health care workers, pharmacy automation, robots for disinfecting clinics, and more. Medical robots were first developed to allow surgeons to operate remotely and/or with improved precision on their patients, and the history of the field is well documented in the literature (1–3). The earliest efforts can be traced back to applications in neurosurgery (4) and orthopedic surgery (5). The first truly long-distance telesurgery was a transatlantic cholecystectomy performed 20 years ago (6). Although early progress in the field was somewhat unsteady, as is to be expected with the introduction of any radically new technology, medical robotics has reached a level of maturity that has encouraged the health care industry to make substantial investments in development activities. Researchers, however, generally look farther into the future and beyond commercial development activities. As we consider some of the key research activities in the past decade, we obtain a glimpse of where medical robotics will head in the coming decades. This article focuses on the past 10 years and provides a retrospective assessment of the major accomplishments in medical robotics. We use an inclusive definition for what constitutes a medical robot that is intended to cover all material that would be appropriate for inclusion in a major robotics research journal or conference. This encompasses single- and multi–degree-of-freedom (DOF) motorized systems with motions that may be preprogrammed, joystick-prescribed, autonomous, or some combination of the three. We define medical robotics research as the creation of new robots and robotic technologies for medical interventions. A large body of medical journal papers devoted to the evaluation of existing medical robots has also been published over the past decade. Because these robots largely represent technologies developed during prior decades, they are not discussed here. Here, our goal was to identify the major research themes or “hot topics” in medical robotics over the decade and to summarize the seminal research papers that concisely highlight these themes. HOT TOPICS OF THEDECADE We identified eight hot topics by searching Web of Science for the most highly cited papers on medical robotics published in 2010–2020 (Table 1 and Fig. 1). These hot topics can be related to specific clinical applications (e.g., topic 1, robotic laparoscopy) or to enabling technologies that find broad applications in medicine (e.g., topic 7, soft robotics). To illustrate how the number of publications in medical robotics has evolved over time, the total number of publications for engineering and medical journals is plotted in Fig. 2. The total number of publications for all but one of the hot topics is also reported in Figs. 2 and 3 (total publications for nonlaparoscopic robots for minimally invasive surgery are not reported because satisfactory search criteria could not be identified.). Note that the vertical scales for