A Cork-Sized Robot Could Make Getting a Dental Crown a One-Visit Procedure

Engineers at the University of Basel have developed the Miniature Intraoral Robot — known as MIR — a compact device designed to scan and prepare a tooth for a dental crown during a single appointment. Roughly the size of a wine cork, the prototype is built to fit comfortably inside the patient's mouth and is designed to move with the patient if they shift position during treatment.

Getting a crown has traditionally required several visits: a dentist first prepares the tooth, then fits a temporary crown, and the permanent restoration is placed at a later appointment. MIR is designed to reduce the number of those appointments, with the goal of allowing a dentist to scan the patient's mouth and order a permanent crown during the same visit in which the tooth is treated.

The robot's motors and control systems are located outside the mouth and connected via flexible cables, while a custom-fitted dental splint — generated from the same diagnostic scan used to plan the crown — anchors the device in place.

In bench tests using synthetic resin and ceramic samples with hardness comparable to natural tooth enamel, the margin of positional error came in below 0.2 millimeters, with that figure expected to decrease further once additional positioning sensors are incorporated.

The project was developed with support from Switzerland's Innosuisse innovation agency, in collaboration with the University of Zurich, the University of Bern, and Basel-based dental implant company Camlog Biotechnologies.

The research is described in a paper titled "Miniature Intraoral Robot (MIR) for Minimally Invasive Tooth Preparation," published in IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics.

The MIR is still in development and has not yet been tested on patients. If it eventually clears further testing and clinical trials, the system could streamline crown preparation, potentially reducing follow-up visits and shifting some of the precision drilling work away from purely handheld instruments.

For patients, the most immediate implication would be fewer trips to the dental chair — a practical change that, if proven safe and effective, could meaningfully reduce the time and logistical burden that currently comes with one of dentistry's most common restorative procedures.