Dental Robot History: Foot Drills to ABB Cobots

Several kinds of dental robot are already at work. Implant surgeons in the United States use robot arms that keep the drill on a planned path, and in September 2026 a Korean startup raised money for a robot that holds the suction tube, the job a dental assistant does all day. This post follows dentistry from foot-powered drills and the first chairside assistants to Yomi, the first FDA-cleared implant robot. Then it looks at this year's news and at where ABB robots such as the GoFa cobot and the IRB 1200 could fit, both at the dental chair and in the labs that make crowns and aligners.

An oral surgeon treats a patient while his assistant holds the suction tube at a New Zealand Defence Force tent clinic, 2012. Photo: New Zealand Defence Force / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How dentists drilled, and who held the suction

For most of the nineteenth century a dentist removed decay with hand instruments or a drill turned between the fingers. Power arrived in steps. In 1868 the American dentist George F. Green built a pneumatic drill driven by foot-operated bellows, and in 1871 James B. Morrison introduced a burr drill powered by a foot pedal, much like a sewing machine. Green patented the first electric dental drill in 1875, and by 1914 electric drills reached about 3,000 rpm. The big jump came with the air turbine handpiece. John Patrick Walsh filed a provisional patent for his design in 1949, and Dentsply began selling it as the Borden Airotor in 1957.

A model of a foot-operated treadle dental drill, made in Germany between 1910 and 1920. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The dentist also gained a second pair of hands. In 1885 the New Orleans dentist C. Edmund Kells started working with a woman assistant at the chair, and he is usually credited with employing the first dental assistant in the United States. Over the following decades the assistant became a fixed part of the team, passing instruments and keeping the mouth clear. High-speed turbines made the second task bigger, because they spray water to cool the tooth, and someone has to remove that water along with saliva and debris while the dentist works. Holding the suction tip is the job the newest dental robots are built to take over.

A US Public Health Service dentist at work while his assistant holds the suction tube in the patient's mouth. Photo: National Library of Medicine via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Robots first reached dentistry through teaching and implants. In 2010 Showa University in Tokyo, working with robot maker tmsuk and Waseda University's Atsuo Takanishi, showed Showa Hanako, a robot patient that blinks, moves its jaw and tongue and reacts when a student slips. Hanako 2 followed in 2011. In March 2017 the US Food and Drug Administration cleared Yomi from the Miami company Neocis, the first robotic guidance system for dental implant surgery. Yomi does not drill by itself: the surgeon holds the handpiece while the arm keeps it at the planned position, angle and depth. In September 2017 a team in Xi'an, China, reported that its robot had placed two 3D-printed implants in a patient after staff set it up.

The Yomi robot, wrapped in a sterile cover, guides the drill during a dental implant operation. Photo: Neocis Inc. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Dental robots in 2026: implants, suction and labs

This autumn's dental robot news is about the assistant's job. On 21 September 2026 the Korean startup Dental Robotics announced a seed round from AI Angel Club, CNTTech, People Investment and Digital Healthcare Partners, amount undisclosed, for an autonomous suction robot. Its six-axis arm combines dental CT and intraoral scan data with a camera that recognises saliva, blood, teeth and gums, then moves the suction tip where it is needed. A pressure sensor at the tip detects contact from about 50 grams. The company says hygienists spend about 2.5 hours a day on suction, and it plans pilots at university hospitals and larger clinics.

A dental technician, an oral surgeon and a Tanzanian colleague place a dental implant in Dar es Salaam, March 2026. Photo: Pfc. Alva Gonzalez / U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Implant robots keep improving as well. Neocis launched Yomi S in November 2025, a smaller system that one person can run with a foot pedal and touchscreen, and says Yomi has helped place nearly 100,000 implants since 2016. In July 2024 the Boston startup Perceptive said its robot had completed the first fully automated dental procedure on a human. In June 2026 researchers at the Fourth Military Medical University, the same Xi'an school behind the 2017 robot, published a lab study in which an autonomous multi-axis robot milled sockets for transplanted teeth in 40 printed jaw models. Its sockets matched the plan more closely than those cut with a static guide, and took about the same time.

A Navy dentist shows CAD/CAM digital dentistry equipment at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, Hawaii, 2016. Photo: Susan E. Schultz / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB does not sell a dental robot, but its arms already appear in dental research. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports from the Wuhan Institute of Technology trimmed clear aligners with an ABB six-axis industrial robot and a small milling cutter. At the chair, the closest ABB product is the GoFa CRB 15000 cobot. It has torque sensors in all six joints, limits its power and force so it can work next to people, and stops when it feels unexpected contact. Dental Robotics describes similar safety features for its suction arm. GoFa is an industrial machine, though, and using one near a patient's mouth would first need medical certification. ABB's work in hospital labs is the closer match today.

Guiding an ABB GoFa cobot by hand. The arm limits its power and force so it can work beside people. Photo: ABB

Where dental robots go next, in clinics and labs

In clinics, the first robots most patients meet will probably be helpers. Holding a suction tip or a light is repetitive work with clear limits, and Dental Robotics says it designs to two standards from the start: IEC 80601-2-77 for surgical robots and ISO 13482 for personal care robots. Implant guidance will keep spreading as the systems get smaller and easier to run. Fully autonomous surgery is further off. Most of the evidence so far comes from printed jaw models and small case reports, and regulators will want clinical trials on real patients before a robot cuts bone without a dentist's hand on the tool.

Dr. Ihab Hanna teaches a live dental implant surgery course in California, 2023. Photo: RWC Implant Study Club / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Dental labs are a likelier home for ordinary industrial robots. Crowns, bridges, night guards and aligners are now designed on a computer and then milled or 3D printed, and much of the remaining hand work is loading machines, removing supports, trimming and polishing. A compact arm like ABB's IRB 1200 is built for exactly that kind of machine tending and small-part finishing. The new generation launched in 2025 comes in 5, 7, 8 and 9 kg versions and runs on the OmniCore controller, with pose repeatability down to 0.011 mm. ABB has not announced a dental lab project, so for now this is only a possibility.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, launched in 2025, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

Cost comes first. A robot has to save more chair time or lab time than it costs, and small practices will wait until someone proves that it does. Safety rules for a machine working inside a person's mouth are also far stricter than anything on a factory floor. Then there are skills. Somebody has to set the robots up, and in a dental lab that will often be a technician who learns to program a cell, first in simulation with RobotStudio or by hand guiding a cobot, as described in our guide to programming robots without code. For most patients, the next few years mean an implant drill held steady by an arm, and perhaps, in a few clinics, an arm holding the suction tip.

Programming a GoFa cobot with block based Wizard software on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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