Industry 4.0 is built around the exchange of information between machines and higher-level systems. Connected machines and far-reaching digitisation ensure that manufacturing companies can make their production lines more flexible, secure and autonomous. For machine builders, connected machines offer the potential to develop digitally supported services.

Robots are often part of cells where high precision tasks may be performed, such as assembly, welding, pick and place that are often complex and repetitive. Being an integral part of the Industry 4.0 new paradigm, collaborative robots have started to be integrated in smart manufacturing eco-systems.

The emerging Industry 4.0 paradigm facilitates intelligent factories where machines, robots and human workers work side by side. Collaboration between these entities in a factory environment allows having higher throughput with the ability to perform complex processes which needs multiple skills from robots as well as humans.

Good polishing experts are hard to find and that is not about to change. The work requires knowledge and experience, is time-consuming, expensive, monotonous and stressful, and takes place in an unhealthy environment. The need for experts is especially acute in the mould construction business.

Over the last years, mobile collaborative robots have been utilised in a series of diverse applications alongside human operators. The main goal has been to support operators towards completing tasks in an easier, time- and cost-effective manner.

Sirris looked into the feasibility of removing support structures from metal additive manufactured (MAM) parts using cobots. The goal of the study was to research the possibilities and challenges of using metal additive manufacturing (MAM) for safety critical class-2 components for aerospace applications.

Many manufacturing companies have identified a critical manual quality visual inspection check within their manufacturing workflow as a process that is repetitive, time consuming and open to errors. In the aerospace sector, for example, every part that is manufactured is machined in pairs, left and right.

Suppose the most critical asset of an assembly line is incapable to handle a temporary surge of demand or worse it is out of order. One solution to address such a scenario would be to have a fully automatic and versatile Plug and Produce (PnP) system, ready on standby that can be summoned to the assembly line.

This study deals with developments in the field of metal lens machining since the 1980s, through scientific articles and patents.

The evolution of the number of patents and publications is illustrated as well as their countries of origin. The main actors are listed.