Development of a robotic system for orthodontic archwire bending

Abstract

Customized archwires are demanded in the lingual orthodontic treatment for patients suffering from malocclusion. Traditionally, these archwires could only be bent by experienced orthodontists manually. This pattern requires a specialized skills training and occupies long charside time, but still cannot ensure the accuracy of appliances. Therefore, a novel robotic system was developed for automatic and accurate preparation in our study. First, the implementation of hardware system was designed. Second, a modular and ROS-integrated control system was developed to control automatic bending. Third, an adaptive sampling-based bending planner with collision checker in a time-varying environment was established and realized in control system architecture. Preliminary validation of the developed robot system and its control system have been conducted both in simulation and physical robotic system. Experimental results have shown that the developed robotic system with its ROS-integrated control system was able to accomplish automatic and accurate orthodontic archwire preparation.