SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Industrial Robotics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1605682
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Industrial RoboticsView all 5 articles
A Comprehensive Review and Bibliometric Analysis on Collaborative Robotics for Industry: Safety Emerging as a Core Focus
Provisionally accepted
Aida Haghighi1*
Morteza Cheraghi1
Jérôme Pocachard2Valérie Botta-Genoulaz3Sabrina Jocelyn4Hamidreza Pourzarei5- 1Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- 2Lycée Henri Loritz, Nancy, France
- 3Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon (INSA Lyon), Villeurbanne, France
- 4Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- 5École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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Research organizations and academics often seek to map the development of scientific fields, identify research gaps, and guide the direction of future research. In cobot-related research, the scientific literature consulted does not propose any comprehensive research agenda. Moreover, cobots, industrial robots inherently designed to collaborate with humans, bring with them emerging issues. To solve them, interdisciplinary research is often essential (e.g., combination of engineering, ergonomics and biomechanics expertise to handle safety challenges). This paper proposes an exhaustive study that employs a scoping review and bibliometric analysis to provide a structured macro perspective on the developments, key topics, and trends in cobot research for industry. A total of 2195 scientific publications were gained from the Web of Science database, and a thorough selection process narrowed them down to 532 papers for comprehensive analysis. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyze bibliometric measures, highlighting publication trends, leading journals, the most productive institutions, engaged countries, influential authors, and prominent research topics. Co-authorship and bibliographic couplings were also examined. Through a co-occurrence analysis of terms, the content and research objectives of the papers were systematically reviewed and lead to a univocal categorization framework. That categorization can support organizations or researchers in different cobotics (collaborative robotics) fields by understanding research developments and trends, identifying collaboration opportunities, selecting suitable publication venues, advancing the theoretical and experimental understanding of automatic collaborative systems, and identifying research directions and predicting the evolution of publication quantity in cobotics.
Keywords: Collaborative robotics, Cobot, Scoping review, bibliometric analysis, Collaborative robot (cobot)
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 16 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Haghighi, Cheraghi, Pocachard, Botta-Genoulaz, Jocelyn and Pourzarei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aida Haghighi, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, M5B 2K3, Ontario, Canada
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