Preliminary study of a new macro-micro robot system for dental implant surgery: Design, development and control

BackgroundThis study aims to develop a new dental implant robotic system (DIRS) to relieve the burden and enhance the quality of dental implant surgery.MethodsThe implanting actuator and system controller are two parts. The implanting actuator is designed on the basis of the RCM mechanism, with its kinematics modelled. Besides, a multi-DOF admittance control strategy and a hybrid position-admittance control strategy were designed, endowing the actuator with environmental compliance.ResultsIn force sensing, about 97% of mixed force/torque are eliminated. Then, 30 groups of implantation are done, of which 15 groups are simple implantation, while another 15 groups are force-based implantation. The results show that the average contact force/torque can be reduced by 73.03% and 62.66%, and the peak contact force/torque can be reduced by 68.26% and 50.46%.ConclusionsThe results of preliminary experiments validate the effectiveness of DIRS, which has great potential to assist dentists with higher efficiency, better quality, and lower burden.