A Compact Asymmetrical Manipulator for Robotic Dentistry

In contemporary society, there is an increasing gap between supply and demand for dental healthcare services. Meanwhile, robotics technology has the potential to greatly improving the working efficiency of dental surgeries hence filling the widening gap. However, newly-developed dental robots, which are based on existing large-sized industrial manipulators, have over-qualified workspace for dental applications. Thus, a miniaturized 6-Degree-of-Freedom robotic manipulator with tendon-driven mechanism was developed. With the manipulator being able of covering the whole human oral cavity, the overall size of the proposed manipulator has been successfully constrained in a 50×50×50cm3 cube which is hardly possible for existing surgical manipulators. Meanwhile, the inverse kinematics algorithm was established through D-H modeling and was then implemented onto an operator console to achieve remote control. Moreover, a dental handpiece was utilized as the surgical end effector. The overall performance of the robotic system was validated with a fabricated prototype, where joints' linearity and torque transmission performances were analyzed from experimental results.