DENTSPLY SIRONA

Dentsply Sirona produce instruments and dental implants for dentists and they have a constant focus on creating innovative solutions that result in better, safer and faster dental care. For the production of dental implants, DIS has developed a vision system and software.

In the production process where Dentsply Sirona weld small components, they used to use an old system, which needed to be updated and automated so that it would be possible to register and adjust the position where the welding is done. For the development of the new vision system, Dentsply Sirona did not have the necessary skills for programming in the computer vision software Halcon, so based on a recommendation they got in touch with DIS, who then became responsible for the development of a vision application able to interface with the customer’s system. DIS was also responsible for preparing the required documentation.

Before the new vision system was implemented, Dentsply Sirona had to locate the welding point manually based on a live feed from a camera before the welding could begin. The software DIS has developed eases the process by letting a vision system calculate the offset automatically. I.e. the inputs to the vision system are images from which the vision system automatically detects the welding point and from here sends an (x-y)-offset coordinate to the welding program, which proceeds to weld the components at the correct welding point.

- We needed a unique solution for an existing setup. The main challenge in the project was that we had two different systems with different cameras that had to interact. Optimizing the vision algorithm was a time-consuming effort that we could not have purchased as a standard product. To have DIS work on the process has meant that we did not need to worry about the task but could focus on some of the many other projects we are working on, says Per Nilsson, Head of Engineering Atlantis, Dentsply Sirona.