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Research in surgical robotics and automation has made remarkable advancements in recent years thanks to new methods in computer vision, control, and deep learning. Autonomous end-effector manipulation is a challenging task in surgical robotics, and cutting with scissor tools is largely unexplored. A concurrent work explored path and trajectory generation for cutting deformable materials using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) [1]. However, an efficient and realistic simulation is necessary for methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) or learned trajectory planning. Our previous work built a simulation for the dVRK in Unity for training RL algorithms on rigid body tasks [2]. To our knowledge, there is no dVRK simulation available that includes the cutting of deformable materials. This paper introduces a cutting simulation of a deformable mesh, which can represent a tissue layer, built onto our Unity dVRK simulation.

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