Control and Motion Scaling of A Compact Cable-driven Dental Robotic Manipulator

Abstract

The burden of dental treatments has become more and more severe due to fast increasing number of patients but relatively slow growth of dentists. The fact that existing dental procedures are mainly performed manually makes it worse since manual operations are usually time-consuming and fully dependent on dentists' personal skills. Advanced techniques for robotic-assisting medical procedures have been developed for improving efficiency as well as efficacy of treatments, however, dental robot is still in its infancy, where most of dental robots were directly adapted from industrial manipulators, the workspace, scale and cost of which are not the optimal for dental applications. In this paper, we propose a dental robotic manipulator for assisting dental drilling procedures, applied with tendon-sheath mechanism for a compact structure as well as motion scaling for micro millimeter-scale motion control. Design and analysis of the whole system have been elaborated, detailed control algorithm as well as the performance of the whole system are also presented. The proposed system with its compact structure, specialized workspace, and scalable motions is intended for assisting dental procedures and hopefully could help improve the current dental treatments to a safer and more automated manner.