Automation of end effector guidance of robotic arm for dental implantation using computer vision

Placing dental implants in humans is a task that requires a large amount of dexterity, effort and precautionary measures on behalf of the dentist. One of the most important sub-task of this procedure is drilling a hole in the jaw of patient. Increasing advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to build robotic arms that can attain the same degree of precision as that of dentist for this sub-task, thus opening a possibility of automating the entire process which would save time and effort of dentists. In addition, vision equips a robot with a large amount of information like the objects in surroundings, their shape, color, etc. This information on being processed can be used to perform actions by a robot to interact with the surroundings and accomplish a certain goal. In this paper, one such application of computer vision has been discussed to accomplish the goal of automation of end effector guidance for dental implantation in human mandible by means of a robotic arm. Computer vision has been used to establish a closed loop feedback control system for the robotic arm, so as to make the end effector of robotic arm reach the desired location for drilling the hole in jaw. Template matching is used to detect the desired point in subsequent frames captured by a camera mounted at the end effector also consisting of a drilling machine. The system proposed in this paper reliably establishes complete automation of the process, thus demanding only a mouse click effort from the dentist.