Operator 4.0 in manufacturing: trends, potential technologies and future perspectives

Abstract

While Industry 4.0 is characterized by greater automation, manual assembly systems continue to play an important role. A search was conducted in INSPEC and Compendex databases to uncover trends in research focused on human/worker in an Industry 4.0 context. In total 1469 relevant bibliographic references where obtained. The bibliographic dataset was analyzed using VOSviewer to create a map of terms. Results from this dataset show a significant change in the rate of scientific production in 2019 (23% Vs. 200%+). Three major communities of terms where identified and mean term occurrence calculated: technological infrastructure (148.7), worker performance (94.4), adoption and integration (72.8). Augmented reality and human-robot collaboration were the most studied technologies associated with workers in an Industry 4.0 context.