APPLICATION OF ROBOT IN FULL DENTURE MAKING

From its appearance, robot has been applied or being studied for being applied to most field of industrial production and daily living, even in oral surgery, there are researchers who are pursuing related robot applied study. But, in the making of full denture, it is still in manual way, we have not found any applied study until now.The traditional clinical operating process of full denture needs a series of complicated steps, the quality and working efficiency mainly depend on the dentist′s experiences and dentistry technician′s skill, in general, only the combination of good dentist and high-level technician could produce desirable full denture.We believe that it is realizable to develop a robot system to complete full denture making at the present condition of robot technique and another relative theory, such as artificial intelligence.The development of robot manufacturing system of full denture is a novel application attempt of robot technology in oral rehabilitation. The rich experiences of dentists and skilled technology of dentistry technicians are integrated into the expert software, and the complicated implanting work of false tooth will be completed by robot and its gripper. This system can automatically design and manufacture a set of full denture that is suitable for the patient according to his/her jaw shape. It will greatly change the manufacturing process of full denture, improving making quality and efficiency obviously.By the research work of this paper, we build the basic hardware structure for robot manufacturing system for full denture, make the three main software blocks for expert pre-arrangement of teeth, 3D display, man-machine interactive modification, control and communication, proceed system′s preliminary test, and realize system′s basic demands.