This literature review presents a comprehensive analysis of the use and potential application scenarios of collaborative robots in the industrial working world, focusing on their impact on human work, safety, and health in the context of Industry 4.0. The aim is to provide a holistic evaluation of the employment of collaborative robots in the current and future working world, which is being increasingly driven by the automation and digitization of production processes, and which can be outlined using the term Work 4.0. In this context, the forms of work organization, and the demands and impacts on humans are changing profoundly. Collaborative robots represent a key technology to aid the transition. The review utilizes expert interviews for identifying relevant keywords, and follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to evaluate peer-reviewed literature between 2002 and January 2022. The analysis includes forms of interaction, and the distribution of roles, control interfaces, safety procedures, and ergonomics and health. In addition, the review offers a heatmap displaying the research topics of 715 publications for each year, and a database of these publications in BibTeX format that is publicly accessible. The review highlights the challenges, potential benefits, and trends of using collaborative robots in the industrial working world, emphasizing the importance of a careful evaluation of their impact on human work, safety, and health. It offers a tool set for researchers and practitioners to further explore and evaluate the employment of collaborative robots in Work 4.0.

SUMMARY: Researchers dream of developing autonomous humanoid robots which behave/walk like a human being. Biped robots, although complex, have the greatest potential for use in human-centred environments such as the home or office. Studying biped robots is also important for understanding human locomotion and improving control strategies for prosthetic and orthotic limbs. Control systems of humans walking in cluttered environments are complex, however, and may involve multiple local controllers and commands from the cerebellum. Although biped robots have been of interest over the last four decades, no unified stability/balance criterion adopted for stabilization of miscellaneous walking/running modes of biped robots has so far been available. The literature is scattered and it is difficult to construct a unified background for the balance strategies of biped motion. The zero-moment point (ZMP) criterion, however, is a conservative indicator of stabilized motion for a class of biped robots. Therefore, we offer a systematic presentation of multi-level balance controllers for stabilization and balance recovery of ZMP-based humanoid robots.

More than thirty years after the initial concepts, commercial Delta and Delta-like robots serve a niche market for high-speed pick-and-place applications. Expired patents and new fields of application have led to increased research and innovative designs. By functionally extending the original translational Delta robot with additional serial chains, commercial concepts obtain up to three additional rotational degrees-of-freedom. In this context, the paper in hand is concerned with the analyses of serial-parallel Delta robots with full orientation capabilities. Based on efficient kinematic relations, an energy-related dynamic model is derived for four potential extensions. By solving the inverse dynamic problem, the influences of the additional serial chains on the actuation torques of the basic parallel Delta robot are analyzed. Furthermore, the merits of each individual concept are evaluated using torque-related indices (i.e., energy consumption and root mean square torque) and discussed from a design point of view. It is shown that two types of extensions are predestined for industrial application. In these variants, the wrist motors are either attached to the frame or to the distal links.