Orthodontic Wire Bending: From Pliers to ABB Robots

Orthodontic wire bending shapes the archwire that runs through the brackets glued to a patient's teeth, and the bends in that wire decide where each tooth is pushed. For a long time orthodontists and technicians did it with handheld pliers. This post follows the job from Edward Angle's German silver wires and the stainless steel and nickel-titanium wires that replaced them, through the first computer-aided bending system in 1984 and SureSmile's wire-bending robots, to 2026 studies of desktop bending robots. It also looks at where ABB robots, which already assemble small parts for medical technology, could fit.

Teeth wearing fixed braces, with an archwire running through the brackets, 2015. Photo: Tamaki Sono / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

From German silver to the first wire-bending machines

Edward Angle brought German silver into orthodontics in 1887, and early appliances also used gold, platinum, iridium, silver and their alloys. Stainless steel was introduced for appliances in 1929, and by 1950 most orthodontists in the United States used 300-series stainless steel. Nickel-titanium was developed in 1960 by William F. Buehler at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and later reached orthodontics. Pseudoelastic NiTi archwires were launched commercially in 1986, and Ormco introduced copper NiTi in 1994. Charles Burstone and Goldberg developed beta-titanium by combining molybdenum with pure titanium, so the wire changed many times while the bending stayed in human hands.

American dentist Edward Hartley Angle in St Louis, Missouri, in 1898. Photo: unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A 2024 review in Cureus describes orthodontists bending archwires with handheld pliers and other tools, work that takes a lot of time, precision and training and still cannot guarantee an accurate appliance, because the wire is stiff and, in nickel-titanium, superelastic. The first computer-aided system for custom archwires came in 1984, when Professor Helge Fischer-Brandies and a colleague worked with an engineering company on BAS, the Bending Art System. It combined a stereoscopic camera, a wire bending unit and a computer program and made wires for both lingual and labial braces, and in 1998 it gained a force module.

Preformed orthodontic archwires standing in a holder, 2005. Photo: Håkan Svensson (Xauxa) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

SureSmile put a robot in the middle of the process. OraMetrix, founded in 1998 by Friedrich Riemeier and Rohit Sachdeva, launched in 1999, received FDA 510(k) clearance in November 2000 and moved its US headquarters from Dallas to Richardson, Texas, in 2003. The orthodontist scans the teeth with a white light scanner or cone beam CT, software moves each tooth to its target position, and the data goes to a robot that bends the wire to fit. In the bending cell, two grippers hold the wire, one of them on a six-axis robot arm, sensors work out the overbend needed, and a resistive heating system can pass current through the wire to set the shape. Dentsply acquired SureSmile in 2018.

Nickel-titanium (nitinol) wires, the alloy family used for NiTi archwires. Photo: Petermaerki / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robot-bent archwires in clinics and labs in 2026

Robot-bent wires also turn up in clinical research. In a study of 16 patients with open bites, treatment designed digitally and finished with robotically bent SureSmile wires kept the widened upper jaw stable over a mean follow-up of 43 months. Other systems took different routes. Alfred Gilbert introduced LAMDA in 2011, an in-house robot that bends archwires in the first order and saves the cost and shipping wait of an outside lab; its successor, Lamdabot 2, has 12 motors and bends from one first molar to the other. Researchers have also bent archwires with a six-axis Motoman UP6.

Fixed braces with brackets and archwires on both arches, 2017. Photo: Suyash Dwivedi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In June 2026 a team published a desktop archwire-bending robot and tested it on a lingual stainless steel wire 0.5 mm thick with nine bending nodes, 12 samples per group. The robot showed smaller deviations than an experienced orthodontist in three angle measurements and in height, matched the orthodontist on most other parameters, and was faster and more consistent. Dental technicians face the same comparison. A March 2026 study of clasps for partial dentures found a robot bending a clasp in a median 69.9 seconds against 336.9 seconds by hand, with better fit and reproducibility.

Transparent brackets and an archwire on a dental model. Photo: Hanabishi / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dental schools still teach the job by hand, and they study how best to do it. On 25 September 2026 the Times of India reported that Shams Hasan Khan, a dental student at Jamia Millia Islamia, won an ICMR student research grant to compare video and NotebookLM-assisted instructions with in-person demonstrations for teaching orthodontic wire-bending. No ABB robot has been reported in archwire bending. ABB's single-arm YuMi IRB 14050, built for small parts assembly close to people, already works on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki, spreading glue beads along a matchbox-sized part faster and with greater repeatability than a person, as ABB describes it.

ABB's single-arm YuMi cobot at work on GE Healthcare's prototype assembly line in Helsinki. Photo: ABB

What robotic archwires still need

Holding the moving gripper of a bending cell, as the six-axis arm does in SureSmile's design, is the kind of handling job ABB's small robots do. The IRB 1100 offers best-in-class repeatability, cycle times up to 35 percent faster and an OmniCore controller, so a SureSmile-style cell built around it is a realistic possibility, though no one has announced one. Such cells would be laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, and the bending itself has much in common with the work in our tube bending post.

An ABB IRB 1200 compact six-axis robot. Photo: ABB

For patients, robot-bent wires mean appliances planned on a 3D model of their own teeth. SureSmile also offers lingual braces, with brackets bonded on the tongue side of the teeth, and systems such as Insignia make custom brackets and archwires from the planned final bite. A 2010 study reported that SureSmile cut treatment time by 34 percent, a figure that comes from a single study. Robots bend retainers too, and a 2025 study used nickel-titanium retainer wires bent by a robot arm. For clinics, the LAMDA idea of an in-house robot points to faster turnaround without shipping.

A boy wearing dental braces, 2020. Photo: João Paulo Sousa / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Getting orthodontists to adopt the machines is harder. A survey of 200 orthodontic residents and orthodontists, run in August and September 2025 and published in 2026, found moderate knowledge, low awareness and negative attitudes toward robotics, and rated wire bending as moderately ready. The barriers named were lack of training, at 28 percent, cost, and workflow integration, at 21 percent, while lower cost and training were the main enablers. The wire itself makes the job hard too, since stiffness and superelasticity mean bends need an overbend that the machine has to predict.

The single-arm YuMi cell on GE Healthcare's prototype line, where the cobot spreads glue on small parts. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com