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3Robot Technology in dentistry, an overview of initiatives49performed with an industrial robot to compare alignment errors between mechanical and robotic alignment. DiscussionSummary of the evidenceThe primary aim of this systematic review was to construct a comprehensive overview of the different robot technology initiatives in all fields of dentistry. A recent review of literature was published by Grischke et al. including 49 articles on a broader field of dental robotics. The review included robot technology in the field of oral and maxillofacial surgery as well as cognitive robotics technology such as machine learning [107]. In contrast to their work, this study has provided a more systematic approach in addition to a narrower search field in order to provide a more thorough overview of all literature concerning physical robotic technology specifically relevant to the general dentist. A broad timeframe (starting in 1985) was used and, besides Medline and Embase, the Scopus database was included in the search. Despite the narrower scope of this review, the number of included articles were almost twice as compared to Grischke et al., emphasizing the thoroughness of this review. Robot technology in dentistry is, compared to general medicine, in its relative infancy. Although articles on this topic started to appear around 20 years ago and initiatives can be found in every field dentistry, the initiatives that made it into practice are scarce. This is interesting since robots can be particularly useful in difficult to reach areas and are known for their accurate performances in a reliable and reproducible manner. This review showed that most research in this field has been limited to those situations where physical contact with a human can be avoided, i.e., education or manipulation of dental materials such as orthodontic wires. As discussed in a recent review by Grischke et al. this might be caused by the limited availability and accessibility of robot systems for dental researchers. Where in earliest experiments industrial robots where used for experiments [105] in recent literature a shift towards widely available, human-compliant robots or even robots specifically designed for dentistry has occurred [87]. Next to that, the use of open-source control software (ROS) for robot control has been described in this review [20, 28, 53]. Together with robot technology improving on a wider scale and generally becoming less expensive, these developments might help to facilitate the progression of initiatives to higher levels of technology readiness more easily. Tom van Riet.indd 49 26-10-2023 11:59