Tooth arrangement for the manufacture of a complete denture using a robot

Abstract

The successful application of robots in surgery and other medical fields prompts us that robots can also play an important role in oral restoration. The traditional way of complete denture manufacturing is manual and only high‐level dentists and skilled technicians can do this work well. But we believe that a robot can do this work better and more easily. Artificial teeth are very complicated in shape, and not easy to be grasped and manipulated accurately by a robot gripper. Aiming at improving our previous robot manufacturing system of complete dentures, we present a new method to perform teeth implanting. We improve the previous manufacturing procedure by adding several components in the operating process. By this method, the robot gripper only needs to grasp and implant intermediate blocks, which have very simple shapes and are easy to handle precisely. The 3D human‐machine tooth arrangement software performs the calculation of intermediate blocks’ positions and orientations. We perform the experiment of tooth arrangement for a patient, and obtain a pair of ideal tooth arches. A complete denture can be manufactured according to this result.