identified. A relevant technology must be developed to address this need that considers the specifics of how the robot adds value for the clinician and for the patient. Medical doctors must be convinced of this value proposition. The technology must also be developed with hospital administrative and financial constraints well considered and without hindering well-established clinical workflows. Potential risks must be identified early on so that ethical approvals can be obtained. Last, attractive business models must be developed to ensure that sufficient investment can be obtained to bring the technology through the complex pathways that must be navigated for any medical device to achieve commercial success. Maximizing the chance of success suggests that technology researchers stray from their ivory towers to form deep collaborations with clinicians, regulators, investors, and the business community. MATERIALS AND METHODS The manuscript is not intended to be a traditional survey that provides sweeping coverage of medical robotics over the decade or to provide an exhaustive bibliography of the field. Instead, our goal was to provide a focused view of the most important research advances of the decade and to point the reader to a small set of papers that are seminal with respect to these advances. Research was defined as the development of new robots and robotic technology. Clinical evaluation papers using existing robots were excluded unless they conveyed an important translational result. This approach, by its nature, injects some subjectivity into the paper; however, we attempted to be as objective as possible. Our approach was as follows. We first developed an initial list of prospective hot topics based on author consensus. This list of topics was then validated and refined by performing a broad search of medical/surgical robotics using Web of Science and then grouping the results by topic. This resulted in dropping some candidate topics while subdividing others into multiple topics. For example, although there has been important work in orthopedic and spinal procedure robots, the highly cited papers were published before 2010. Furthermore, we observed that there was important research on procedure-specific robots that did not fit into any of the hot topics. This included robots developed for endoluminal and natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery procedures along with robots for microsurgery. To include this work, we added a final hot topic on nonlaparoscopic procedure–specific robots. Given this list of hot topics, we then sought to identify topicspecific search terms for use with Web of Science that would provide comprehensive coverage for that topic. Our goal was twofold. First, we wished to identify the total number of papers published on each hot topic as reported in Figs. 2 and 3. Second, for inclusion in our bibliography, we wished to identify the most influential papers for each topic based on citation count. Identification of the topic-specific search terms meeting these two goals was an iterative process. Initially, each search was formulated by building a set of common terms related to medical robots that returned the most comprehensive set of relevant references: (medical* OR medicine OR surgical OR surgery OR surgeon (in TOPIC) AND robot* OR manipulator (in TOPIC)). This search was then further constrained using keywords for each hot topic. The keywords were tested and revised by reviewing the search results based on the authors’ knowledge of the field to ensure that the results for the top 100 cited papers returned by the search were both relevant and comprehensive. This approach worked well for four of the eight topics. For the remaining four topics, it was also necessary to adapt the common search terms along with topicspecific keywords to identify a search that yielded relevant and comprehensive results. Each section of the paper was then composed on the basis of the authors’ knowledge of the topic as supported by the search results. For each hot topic, a small number of the most highly cited research papers were selected to support the major concepts. These are the papers included in the bibliography. Although, in some cases, papers had similar numbers of citations and subjective decisions were made to pick one over another, the overall selection process was objective. Survey papers were excluded. Paper citation counts included in the bibliography of the Supplementary Materials are from Web of Science. Patent citation counts are from Lens.org. Data were collected on 11 October 2021. Data within Figs. 2 and 3 Figures 2 and 3 report the year-by-year numbers of publications resulting from the Web of Science searches for the individual and combined hot topic searches. The results are further broken down by publication type (engineering versus medical journals). Searches were performed on 11 October 2021. Web of Science search terms The sets of search terms for each hot topic that are listed below were used with Web of Science to identify the most highly cited papers for each topic. Robots forlaparoscopic surgery medical* OR medicine OR surgical OR surgery OR surgeon (in TOPIC) AND robot* OR manipulator (in TOPIC) AND laparoscop* (in TOPIC and TITLE). Nonlaparoscopic procedure–specific robots medical* OR medicine OR surgical OR