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

Background: This study aims to develop a new dental implant robotic system (DIRS) to relieve the burden and enhance the quality of dental implant surgery. Methods: The 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. Results: In 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%. Conclusions: The results of preliminary experiments validate the effectiveness of DIRS, which has great potential to assist dentists with higher efficiency, better quality, and lower burden.