Human-robot collaborative assembly towards human-centric manufacturing paradigm: a review

With the emergence of Industry 5.0, human–robot collaboration (HRC) has attracted increasing attention in intelligent manufacturing. In assembly scenarios, HRC aims to combine the flexibility, experiential knowledge, and contextual judgment of human operators with the high precision, payload capacity, and consistent operational performance of collaborative robots, thereby improving assembly efficiency, quality, and adaptability. In recent years, a growing number of review studies on human–robot collaborative assembly (HRCA) have been published. However, existing reviews have largely focused on specific technologies, application scenarios, or localized issues, leaving further room for discussion on the system-level mechanisms among the key stages of perception, decision-making, and execution in the process of HRCA. To further extend the perspectives offered by existing reviews, this paper provides a systematic review of HRCA. First, it clarifies the definition, main characteristics, core research themes, and evolutionary trajectory of HRCA within assembly systems. Then, following the “perception–decision–execution” technical chain, it systematically reviews and analyzes the key enabling technologies and representative methods for HRCA. Finally, it identifies the major challenges currently facing HRCA and discusses future research directions toward symbiotic HRCA. This paper aims to provide a structured reference for researchers and engineering practitioners and to support the large-scale deployment and value realization of HRC technologies in assembly scenarios.