A Robot-Assisted System for Dental Implantation

For treating tooth defects or loss, dental implant technology is the main treatment method because of its comfort, beauty, durability and no damage to the adjacent teeth. Free-hand operation for dental implant surgery highly depends on the clinical experience of the doctors and their state during the operation. Moreover, the training period is long. Additionally, dental implant surgery guided by an implant guide plate also has some limitations, such as poor cooling effect, high chance of thermal burn injury to the bone, blind operation, inability to make real-time adjustments during the operation, etc. In this study, a robot-assisted dental implant implantation system guided by the NOKOV optical motion capture system is presented, and the functions of each component of the system is introduced. The kinematics of the system was analyzed, and the coordinate transformation between the optical motion capture system and the manipulator was completed. Finally, the motion planning of the manipulator was simulated according to the pose recognized by the optical motion capture system. The results of the simulation confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed robot-assisted system. Our findings suggested that the system should be further investigated for practical applications in the future.