A robot for dentists?

A robot for dentists would strike many of us as being a bit odd and perhaps frightening.

But it’s a human-looking robot, with teeth, designed to be used for dental students to practice on.

It’s well known that the Japanese have a cultural fascination with robots – so there’s not a lot of surprise that the 2007 International Robot Exhibition was held in Tokyo this year

One of the big attractions at the Exhibition this year was the ‘Simroid’ – which looks like a Japanese woman sitting in a dentist chair. It’s definitely unusual as when dental students aren’t careful with their tools, sensors in the robot’s mouth will alert software which will make the robot squirm and say ‘Ouch! That hurt!’

While this product isn’t available to students yet, it seems that particularly in Japan both industry leaders and legislators are preparing for the wide-spread introduction of robot helpers into society. Japan’s first draft legislation to control the manufacture of robots and their subsequent interaction with society was produced earlier this year. As well, Japanese companies such as the Kokoro Company Limited (which produced the Simroid) are industry leaders in robotics technology.

The Kokoro company is a subsidiary of Sanrio, which is best known outside of Japan as being the originator of the ‘Hello Kitty’ brand of products. At first, it may appear a bit odd that a manufacturer of ‘fluffy consumer products’ owns a company which is an innovator in robotics. However, Sanrio describes itself as a ‘social communication’ business – producing cute characters, toys, branded theme parks – all in the name of entertainment. Similarly, Kokoro, to this point in it’s history has been largely involved in entertainment. The company has produced animatronics for museums, exhibitions and theme parks ranging from mechanical dinosaurs through to robot theatre with machines taking the place of actors. The Simroid dental training robot obviously is a reflection of Korkoro’s Sanrio heritage. And now Kokoro’s attention to life-like detail in it’s robotic products seems to only need one final detail – interaction with humans.

What might robots in the future be like? Read on...