A Literature Review on Control Techniques for Collaborative Robotics in Industrial Applications

One of the key enabling technologies that has made Industry 4.0 a concrete reality is without doubt collaborative robotics, which is also evolving as a fundamental pillar of the next revolution, the so-called Industry 5.0. The improvement of safety and employees' well-being, together with the increment of profitability and productivity, are indeed the main goals of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in the industrial setting. The robotic controller design and the analysis of existing decision and control techniques are crucially needed to develop innovative models and state-of-the-art methodologies for a safe, ergonomic, and efficient HRC. To this aim, this article presents an accurate review of the most recent and relevant papers in the related field, focusing on the control perspective. All the surveyed works are carefully selected and categorized by target (i.e., safety, ergonomics, and efficiency), and then by problem and type of control, in presence or absence of optimization. Finally, the discussion of the achieved results and the analysis of the emerging challenges in this research field are reported, highlighting the identified gaps and promising future developments in the context of the digital evolution.