Dental Robotics: A Method to Automatize Dental Veneer Preparation.
Engineering
CMPE 195
A dental veneer is a crown that is placed on the front side of the tooth in order to either improve the aesthetics, or to recover the damaged surface. Traditionally, this is done by a dentist first sculpturing the tooth so that a veneer could be placed, then taking an impression, then send the impression to a remote laboratory to create a veneer that fits the sculptured tooth, and then finally placing the dental veneer that has arrived. The main issues with the traditional method is that inconsistencies exist in the dentist's manual operation and the patient must wait with a temporary veneer to cover the exposed interior of the tooth until the dental veneer arrives. A major advantage of automatizing the preparation process with a robot is that robots can produce consistent motions, and therefore the final shape of the sculptured tooth could be determined ahead of time, which allows the dental veneer to be created ahead of time, eliminating the waiting time between the sculpturing of the tooth and the arrival of the veneer. Based on this motivation, we develop a method to make the robot do the sculpturing reliably based on the scan of the tooth, and asses how well can a robot carry out the procedure compared to a human dentist.
