Research On Path Planning And Bending Control Of An Orthodontic Archwire Bending System

Physical beauty and health is getting more attention as our life improved. A beautiful shape and good health can bring us confidence, while malocclusion as one of the common dental diseases not only affects our appearance, but also cause critical healthy problems. Research on orthodontics has become a hot issue in the contemporary stomatology. While in clinics, orthodontic appliances heavily rely on manual preparation. This pattern requires a wealth of clinic experience, long char-side time with complicated processes, but still cannot ensure the accuracy. Using this appliances will directly affect actual treatment result.In recent years, with the development of automation and robotic industry, the concept substitution of the machine, which means robots can replace human beings to do certain work, has inspired orthodontics to move forward from a traditional manual preparation pattern to automatic and precise preparation. Therefore, this dissertation is subject to an orthodontic archwire bending system, exploring the theories and engineering problems in automatic preparation. And the ultimate aim is to boost the development and early application of orthodontic archwire bending system in clinics.The work of this dissertation mainly forces on the path planning and bending control issues of an actual robotic system, including a proposed sequence planning algorithm driven by archwire parameterization method for shape-changing. For the springback effect, a compensation method based on an overbend prediction model and force detection are also established for accurate bends forming.To validate the proposed algorithm, a simulator based on ROS will be built with real-time shape changing visualization of the archwire. The proposed planning and control method will be realized and well-validated in the simulator. For development of the prototype for archwire bending, an industrial robot will be integrated under ROS framwork with SOAP communication protocol.At last but not least, experiments will be conducted on simulator and the self-developed prototype. The feasibility and effectiveness of proposed methods and strategies will be veried, and results have shown that the developed robotic system using proposed planning and control method would be able to accomplish automatic orthodontic archwire bending.