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In recent years, the emergence of Industry 4.0 technologies has introduced manufacturing disruptions that necessitate the development of accompanying socio-technical solutions. There is growing interest for manufacturing enterprises to embrace the drivers of the Smart Industry paradigm. Among these drivers, human–robot physical co-manipulation of objects has gained significant interest in the literature on assembly operations. Motivated by the requirement for human dyads between the human and the robot counterpart, this study investigates recent literature on the implementation methods of human–robot collaborative assembly scenarios. Using a combination of strings, the researchers performed a systematic review search, sourcing 451 publications from various databases (Science Direct (253), IEEE Xplore (49), Emerald (32), PudMed (21) and SpringerLink (96)). A coding assignment in Eppi-Reviewer helped screen the literature based on ‘exclude’ and ‘include’ criteria. The final number of full-text publications considered in this literature review is 118 peer-reviewed research articles published up until September 2022. The findings anticipate that research publications in the fields of human–robot collaborative assembly will continue to grow. Understanding and modeling the human interaction and behavior in robot co-assembly is crucial to the development of future sustainable smart factories. Machine vision and digital twins modeling begin to emerge as promising interfaces for the evaluation of tasks distribution strategies for mitigating the actual human ergonomic and safety risks in collaborative assembly solutions design.

Disabilities are a global issue due to the decrease in life quality and mobility of patients, especially people suffering from hand disabilities. This paper presents a review of active hand exoskeleton technologies, over the past decade, for rehabilitation, assistance, augmentation, and haptic devices. Hand exoskeletons are still an active research field due to challenges that engineers face and are trying to solve. Each hand exoskeleton has certain requirements to fulfil to achieve their aims. These requirements have been extracted and categorized into two sections: general and specific, to give a common platform for developing future devices. Since this is still a developing area, the requirements are also shaped according to the advances in the field. Technical challenges, such as size requirements, weight, ergonomics, rehabilitation, actuators, and sensors are all due to the complex anatomy and biomechanics of the hand. The hand is one of the most complex structures in the human body; therefore, to understand certain design approaches, the anatomy and biomechanics of the hand are addressed in this paper. The control of these devices is also an arising challenge due to the implementation of intelligent systems and new rehabilitation techniques. This includes intention detection techniques (electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), admittance) and estimating applied assistance. Therefore, this paper summarizes the technology in a systematic approach and reviews the state of the art of active hand exoskeletons with a focus on rehabilitation and assistive devices.

The capabilities of collaborative robotics have transcended the conventional abilities of decentralised robots as it provides benefits such as scalability, flexibility and robustness. Collaborative robots can operate safely in complex human environments without being restricted by the safety cages or barriers that often accompany them. Collaborative robots can be used for various applications such as machine tending, packaging, process tasks and pick and place. This paper proposes an improvement of the current virtual impedance algorithm by developing an adaptive virtual impedance controlled mobile multi-robot system focused on dynamic obstacle avoidance with a controlled planar movement. The study includes the development of a mobile multi-robot platform whereby each robot plans a path individually without a supervisor. The proposed system would implement a two-layered hierarchy for robot path planning. The higher layer generates a trajectory from the current position to the desired position, and the lower layer develops a real-time strategy to follow the generated trajectory while avoiding static and dynamic obstacles. The key contribution of this paper is the adaptive virtual impedance controller for a multi-robot system that will maintain movement stability and improve the motion behaviour in a dynamic environment.