Dental Lab Automation: Wax Crowns to ABB Robots

Dental lab automation is about the room most patients never see: the laboratory where crowns, bridges, dentures and implant parts are made after the dentist takes an impression. For a century that work was done by technicians carving wax and casting metal at a bench. Computers then took over design and milling, and 3D printers followed. What people still do is mostly load the machines, move parts between them and finish by hand, and robots are starting to appear in that work. This post looks at how dental labs got here, what changed this autumn and how ABB robots could take on the loading work.

A dental technician finishes a restoration at his bench, 2023. Photo: Peaceamist / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How dental technicians carved and cast by hand

For most of the twentieth century a crown began as a plaster model poured from the dentist's impression. The technician built the tooth in wax on that model, a step called the wax up. The wax pattern was then set in investment material, burned out in a furnace and replaced with molten metal, the lost wax method. Gold inlays made this way were first reported by the American dentist William Taggart in 1907. Armies needed the skill in quantity: during the First World War, soldier dental mechanics worked at long benches in field laboratories in France.

New Zealand soldier dental mechanics at work in Nielles, France, during the First World War. Photo: National Library of New Zealand via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

The bench stayed much the same for decades. A technician in the 1960s still waxed, invested, cast and polished each unit, then layered porcelain by hand and fired it in a small furnace. Quality depended on the person, and a busy lab grew by hiring more technicians. Computers offered the first way out. In the 1970s the French professor François Duret and his colleagues built the first dental CAD/CAM system, which scanned a prepared tooth, designed the restoration on screen and milled it from a block. His later Sopha system was never widely used.

A dental laboratory technician at work on a bench machine in 1967. Photo: Doug Youvan / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Werner Mörmann and his colleagues in Zurich had more success in the mid-1980s with CEREC, a compact machine that scanned an inlay preparation and milled the restoration from a ceramic block next to the dental chair. In Sweden the Procera system grew into a central production site linked to scanners in labs around the world, making all ceramic frameworks. Milling and later 3D printing took most of the carving out of the lab, but someone still had to place blanks in mills, carry parts to sintering furnaces and wash and cure the prints.

A ceramic block goes into a Sirona inLab MC XL milling unit in a military dental clinic, 2009. Photo: Cpl. Brian Lewis, US Marine Corps / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dental lab automation in 2026

This autumn's news is about joining the steps together. On 13 October 2026 SprintRay announced at its 3DNext event in Miami Beach a wireless intraoral scanner called Foundation and a compact Nano Series for chairside printing, washing and curing. The company says its ecosystem has produced more than 20 million dental parts and that over 80 percent of chairside print jobs are for a single patient and a single case. On 21 October ROE Dental Laboratory introduced a fully digital overdenture made without physical models.

A single zirconia front tooth crown made in a dental laboratory. Photo: James Roback, UticaDentalLab / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Machine builders have handled part of the loading themselves. Amann Girrbach's Ceramill Matik mill holds 36 blanks in a tank and up to 26 tools, and the company says it can run on its own overnight and at weekends. The milling maker imes icore describes loader systems that mill several jobs in a row without supervision, followed by zirconia sintering at 1,450 to 1,600 °C, where parts shrink by about 20 to 25 percent. Robot arms appear in larger labs. A 2020 report in LMT described a robotic arm at Argen placing titanium blanks into Fanuc Robodrill machines to make custom implant abutments.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

ABB does not yet have a named dental lab customer, and the dental robot post covers its other dental research. Its existing robots could still do the lab's loading jobs. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could load blanks into a mill and unload finished crowns while technicians work beside it. A single arm YuMi IRB 14050 could move printed parts from a printer to wash and cure stations. An IRB 1300 could handle sintering trays. Cells like these are normally planned and checked in RobotStudio before anyone buys hardware.

Programming a single arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Where dental lab automation goes next

Over the next few years the large labs are likely to look more like small factories. Cases arrive as scan files, software designs most crowns with a technician checking them, and mills, printers and furnaces run through the night. Robots will probably take the loading and unloading first, because that work is repetitive and the parts are small and arrive in standard holders. Technicians would keep the work machines still do badly: colour matching, layering ceramic for front teeth and fixing anything that does not fit.

A Navy dental technician sets the porcelain oven used to bake crowns aboard USS Nimitz, 2003. Photo: Maebel Tinoko, US Navy / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dental practices are moving in a different direction. Chairside printers and mills let a dentist make a crown or a splint during one visit, and SprintRay's figure on single patient jobs shows how many of these machines run one case at a time. Small practice machines will probably stay manual or use simple built-in loaders, since an arm costs more than it saves for a few jobs a day. Patients mostly feel the change as fewer visits and quicker turnaround, much like eyeglass lens labs changed how fast new glasses arrive.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first problem. Many dental labs are small businesses, and a robot cell has to pay back on a modest volume. Safety and quality come next. A crown is a medical device, so each automated step needs traceability, and a cobot working next to technicians needs a proper risk assessment. Then there are skills. Technicians trained to carve wax and layer porcelain now also need to run design software, maintain mills and, in the bigger labs, program the robots that feed them.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

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