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With the increasing requirements for intelligence in the field of aviation manufacturing, manual assembly can hardly adapt to the trend of future production. The purpose of this study is to realize the semi-automatic assembly of the movable airfoil by proposing a human-robot collaborative assembly strategy based on adaptive admittance control.

A logical judgment system for operating intentions is introduced in terms of different situations of the movements; hence, a human cognition-based adaptive admittance control method is developed to curb the damage of inertia; then virtual limit walls are raised on the periphery of the control model to ensure safety; finally, simulated and experimental comparisons with other admittance control methods are conducted to validate the proposed method.

The proposed method can save at least 28.8% of the time in the stopping phase which effectively compensates for inertia during the assembly process and has high robustness concerning data disturbances.

Due to the human-robot collaboration to achieve compliant assembly of movable airfoils can preserve human subjectivity while overcoming the physical limits of humans, which is of great significance to the investigation of intelligent aircraft assembly, the proposed method that reflects the user's naturalness and intuitiveness can not only enhance the stability and the flexibility of the manipulation, but also contribute to applications of industrial robots in the field of human-robot collaboration.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the robot trends of the next generation.

This paper is divided into two sections: the key modern technology on which Europe's robotics industry has built its foundation is described. Then, the next key megatrends were analyzed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are technologies of major importance for the development of humanity. This time is mature for the evolution of industrial and service robots. The perception of robot use has changed from threading to aiding. The cost of mass production of technological devices is decreasing, while a rich set of enabling technologies is under development. Soft mechanisms, 5G and AI have enabled us to address a wide range of new problems. Ethics should guide human behavior in addressing this newly available powerful technology in the right direction.

The paper describes the impact of new technology, such as AI and soft robotics. The world of work must react quickly to these epochal changes to enjoy their full benefits.

Service robotics, a branch of robotics that entails the development of robots able to assist humans in their environment, is of growing interest in the hospitality industry. Designing effective autonomous service robots, however, requires an understanding of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), a relatively young discipline dedicated to understanding, designing, and evaluating robotic systems for use by or with humans. HRI has not yet received sufficient attention in hospitality robotic design, much like Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) in property management system design in the 1980s. This article proposes a set of introductory HRI guidelines with implementation standards for autonomous hospitality service robots.

A set of key user-centered HRI guidelines for hospitality service robots were extracted from 52 research articles. These are organized into service performance categories to provide more context for their application in hospitality settings.

Based on an extensive literature review, this article presents some HRI guidelines that may drive higher levels of acceptance of service robots in customer-facing situations. Deriving meaningful HRI guidelines requires an understanding of how customers evaluate service interactions with humans in hospitality settings and to what degree those will differ with service robots.

Robots are challenging assumptions on how hospitality businesses operate. They are being increasingly deployed by hotels and restaurants to boost productivity and maintain service levels. Effective HRI guidelines incorporate user requirements and expectations in the design specifications. Compilation of such information for designers of hospitality service robots will offer a clearer roadmap for them to follow.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the method for grasping a defined set of objects in an unstructured environment. To this end, the authors propose the method of integrating convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection and the category-free grasping method. The considered scenario is related to mobile manipulating platforms that move freely between workstations and manipulate defined objects. In this application, the robot is not positioned with respect to the table and manipulated objects. The robot detects objects in the environment and uses grasping methods to determine the reference pose of the gripper.

The authors implemented the whole pipeline which includes object detection, grasp planning and motion execution on the real robot. The selected grasping method uses raw depth images to find the configuration of the gripper. The authors compared the proposed approach with a representative grasping method that uses a 3D point cloud as an input to determine the grasp for the robotic arm equipped with a two-fingered gripper. To measure and compare the efficiency of these methods, the authors measured the success rate in various scenarios. Additionally, they evaluated the accuracy of object detection and pose estimation modules.

The performed experiments revealed that the CNN-based object detection and the category-free grasping methods can be integrated to obtain the system which allows grasping defined objects in the unstructured environment. The authors also identified the specific limitations of neural-based and point cloud-based methods. They show how the determined properties influence the performance of the whole system.

The authors identified the limitations of the proposed methods and the improvements are envisioned as part of future research.

The evaluation of the grasping and object detection methods on the mobile manipulating robot may be useful for all researchers working on the autonomy of similar platforms in various applications.

The proposed method increases the autonomy of robots in applications in the small industry which is related to repetitive tasks in a noisy and potentially risky environment. This allows reducing the human workload in these types of environments.

The main contribution of this research is the integration of the state-of-the-art methods for grasping objects with object detection methods and evaluation of the whole system on the industrial robot. Moreover, the properties of each subsystem are identified and measured.

Humanoid robots that are artificially intelligent have infiltrated almost every aspect of life, including libraries, and can do things that humans are incapable of doing with greater efficiency in the library. It is on that note that this study has examined artificial intelligence (AI) humanoid robots for public libraries reference services. This study aims to discuss AI and draw the link between it and robotic technology.

This study adopted conceptual analysis and review of literature on AI humanoid robots for public libraries reference services.

This study focused not only on humanoid robots but also discovered that there are other types of robots relevant to libraries including chatbot, telepresence and shelve-reading robots as well as general robots such as aerospace robots, drones and army robots, commercial entertainment robots, industrial robots and medical-surgical robots. This paper also reported the usefulness of robots in libraries, and zero in on robots and reference services in the library. Lastly, this study reported the impact of humanoid robots on reference services in public libraries.

This paper is the original idea from the authors and does not reflect on any copyrighted materials. This study recommended among others that public libraries (in collaboration with their parent organisations) devise a strategic plan for new and emerging technologies such as humanoid robots.

Rapid urbanisation and recent shock events have reiterated the need for resilient infrastructure, as seen in the pandemic. Yet, knowledge gaps in construction robotics and human–robot teams (HRTs) research limit maximising these emerging technologies’ potentials. This paper aims to review the state of the art of research in this area to identify future research directions in HRTs able to aid the resilience and responsiveness of the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector.

A total of 71 peer-reviewed journal articles centred on robotics and HRTs were reviewed through a quantitative approach using scientometric techniques using Gephi and VOSviewer. Research focus deductions were made through bibliometric analysis and co-occurrence analysis of reviewed publications.

This study revealed sparse and small research output in this area, indicating immense research potential. Existing clusters signifying the need for further studies are on automation in construction, human–robot teaming, safety in robotics and robotic designs. Key publication outlets and construction robotics contribution towards the built environment’s resilience are discussed.

The identified gaps in the thematic areas illustrate priorities for future research focus. It raises awareness on human factors in collaborative robots and potential design needs for construction resilience.

Rapid urbanisation and recent shock events have reiterated the need for resilient infrastructure, as seen in the pandemic. Yet, knowledge gaps in construction robotics and HRTs research limit maximising these emerging technologies’ potentials. This paper aims to review the state of the art of research in this area to identify future research directions in HRTs able to aid the resilience and responsiveness of the AEC sector.

Exoskeletons are mechanical structures that humans can wear to increase their strength and endurance. The purpose of this paper is to explain how exoskeletons can be used to improve performance across five phases of manufacturing.

Multivocal literature review, encompassing scientific literature and the grey literature of online reports, etc., to inform comprehensive, comparative and critical analyses of the potential of exoskeletons to improve manufacturing performance.

There are at least eight different types of exoskeletons that can be used to improve human strength and endurance in manual work during different phases of production. However, exoskeletons can have the unintended negative consequence of reducing human flexibility leading to new sources of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) and accidents.

Findings are relevant to function allocation research concerned with manual production work. In particular, exoskeletons could exacerbate the traditional trade-off between human flexibility and robot consistency by making human workers less flexible.

The introduction of exoskeletons requires careful health and safety planning if exoskeletons are to improve human strength and endurance without introducing new sources of MSD and accidents.

The originality of this paper is that it provides detailed information about a new manufacturing technology: exoskeletons. The value of this paper is that it provides information that is comprehensive, comparative and critical about exoskeletons as a potential alternative to robotics across five phases of manufacturing.

This paper reviews literature on the application of intelligent systems in the libraries with a special issue on the ES/AI and Robot. Also, it introduces the potential of libraries to use intelligent systems, especially ES/AI and robots.

Descriptive and content review methods are applied, and the researchers critically reviewed the articles related to library ESs and robots from Web of Science as a general database and Emerald as a specific database in library and information science from 2007–2017. Four scopes considered to classify the articles as technology, service, user and resource. It is found that published researches on the intelligent systems have contributed to many librarian purposes like library technical services like the organization of information resources, storage and retrieval of information resources, library public services as reference services, information desk and other purposes.

A review of the previous studies shows that ESs are a useable intelligent system in library and information science that mimic librarian expert’s behaviors to support decision making and management. Also, it is shown that the current information systems have a high potential to be improved by integration with AI technologies. In this researches, librarian robots mostly designed for detection and replacing books on the shelf. Improving the technology of gripping, localizing and human-robot interaction are the main concern in recent librarian robot research. Our conclusion is that we need to develop research in the area of smart resources.

This study has a new approach to the literature review in this area. We compared the published papers in the field of ES/AI and robot and library from two databases, general and specific.

The aim of this study is to examine the existing literature on service robots in order to identify prominent themes, assess the present state of service robotics research and highlight the contributions of seminal publications in the business, management and hospitality domain.

This study analysed 332 Scopus papers from 1985 to 2022 using bibliometric techniques like citation and co-citation analysis.

The study findings highlighted that there has been a consistent rise in publications related to service robots. The paper identifies three significant themes in the service robot literature: adoption of service robots in the context of customer service, anthropomorphism and integration of artificial intelligence in robotic service. Furthermore, this study highlights prominent authors, journals, institutions and countries associated with research on service robots and discusses the future research opportunities in this domain.

This study contributes to the service robots’ literature in the hospitality context by compilation of various reference materials using a comprehensive bibliometric analysis. Previous studies do not point out crucial themes in this area, nor do they provide an overview of prominent journals, institutions, authors and trends in this field. Therefore, this study attempts to fill the lacunae.

The paper presents a research methodology that could be used to carry out a systematic literature review on the current state of the art of the technological development in the field of the digitalization and unphysicalization of supply chains (SCs). A three-dimensional conceptual framework focusing on the relationship between Digital Technologies (DTs), business processes and SC performance is presented. The study identifies the emerging practices and areas of SC management that could be positively affected by the implementation of DTs. With this in mind, the emerging practices have a high probability to be considered future best practices.

A systematic literature review was conducted on DTs in SC management. The methodology used aims to algorithmically and objectively standardize the information incorporated into thousands of scientific documents. Selected papers were analyzed to investigate the recent literature on SC digitalization and unphysicalization. A total of 87 DTs were selected to be analyzed and subsequently grouped into 11 macro-categories. 17 business processes linked to SC management are taken into account and 17 different impacts on SC management are presented. From a set of 1,585 papers, 5,060 emerging practices were collected and singularly summarized combining DT, business process and impact on SC performance.

A unique analytical perspective provided represents an important evolution when trying to organize the current literature on SC management. The widely used DTs in the practices and the most considered business processes and impacts are highlighted and described. The three-dimensional conceptual framework is graphically represented to allow for the emergence of the best combinations of DT, business process and impact on SC performance. These combinations suggest the most promising areas for the implementation of the emerging practices for SC digitalization and unphysicalization. Additional findings identify and define the most important contexts in which Big Data contributes to SC performance.

The research methodology used is offering progress through which to systemize the current practices as well as detect the potential of digitalization and unphysicalization under the three-dimensional conceptual framework. The paper provides a structured proposal for promising future research directions, assuming that the five research gaps as findings of this research could be the basis for prescriptions, as well as a future research agenda and theory development. Moreover, this research contributes to current managerial issues concerning SC management, referred to data and information management, efficiency and productivity of SC processes, market performance, SC relationship management and risk management in SC.