The Leaflet JS mapping library has lots of plugins available. The Leaflet package for R provides direct support for some, but far from all, of these plugins, by providing R functions for invoking the plugins.
If you as an R user find yourself wanting to use a Leaflet plugin that isn't directly supported in the R package, you can use the technique shown here to load the plugin yourself and invoke it using JS code.
@micahwilhelm, here is the code on how to integrate this plugin.
I wish someone could find a way to add group markers from R, not only from Javascript...