Producing the perfect crown is complicated process. It usually takes five days from when a dentist sends an impression of a patient’s teeth to the lab, until the finished crown returns. Glidewell Laboratories in Newport Beach, California, wanted to optimize this process.
The main challenge was a 10-minute milling cycle, which made it unfeasible to have an operator stationed at the machine. Instead, the lab manually inserted the crowns in batches of 15 each, which only needed to be done every two hours.
David Leeson, engineering manager at Glidewell, believed an intelligent automation solution could ensure a more fluent process and soon his research led him to Universal Robots:
“I had followed the collaborative robot development for a while, and hearing that the UR robots were used at BMW was a vote of confidence in this new type of robot”, Leeson says.
