A New Era of Intelligent Factories

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Human–robot collaboration has long been promised as a cornerstone of next-generation manufacturing, yet conventional robots often fall short—constrained by brittle programming, limited perception, and minimal understanding of human intent. Industrial lines are dynamic, and robots that cannot adapt struggle to perform reliably. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence, especially large language models and multimodal learning, have begun to show how machines could communicate and reason in more human-like ways. But the integration of these capabilities into factory environments remains fragmented. Because of these challenges, deeper investigation into vision-language-model-based human–robot collaboration is urgently needed.

Smart environments

A team from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology has published a survey in Frontiers of Engineering Management (March 2025), delivering the first comprehensive mapping of how vision-language models (VLMs) are reshaping human–robot collaboration in smart manufacturing. Drawing on 109 studies from 2020–2024, the authors examine how VLMs —AI systems that jointly process images and language—enable robots to plan tasks, navigate complex environments, perform manipulation, and learn new skills directly from multimodal demonstrations.

The survey traces how VLMs add a powerful cognitive layer to robots, beginning with core architectures based on transformers and dual-encoder designs. It outlines how VLMs learn to align images and text through contrastive objectives, generative modeling, and cross-modal matching, producing shared semantic spaces that robots can use to understand both environments and instructions. In task planning, VLMs help robots interpret human commands, analyse real-time scenes, break down multi-step instructions, and generate executable action sequences. Systems built on CLIP, GPT-4V, BERT, and ResNet achieve success rates above 90% in collaborative assembly and tabletop manipulation tasks. In navigation, VLMs allow robots to translate natural-language goals into movement, mapping visual cues to spatial decisions. These models can follow detailed step-by-step instructions or reason from higher-level intent, enabling robust autonomy in domestic, industrial, and embodied environments. In manipulation, VLMs help robots recognise objects, evaluate affordances, and adjust to human motion—key capabilities for safety-critical collaboration on factory floors. The review also highlights emerging work in multimodal skill transfer, where robots learn directly from visual-language demonstrations rather than labour-intensive coding.

Industrial contexts

The authors emphasise that VLMs mark a turning point for industrial robotics because they enable a shift from scripted automation to contextual understanding. “Robots equipped with VLMs can comprehend both what they see and what they are told,” they explain, highlighting that this dual-modality reasoning makes interaction more intuitive and safer for human workers. At the same time, they caution that achieving large-scale deployment will require addressing challenges in model efficiency, robustness, and data collection, as well as developing industrial-grade multimodal benchmarks for reliable evaluation.

The authors envision VLM-enabled robots becoming central to future smart factories—capable of adjusting to changing tasks, assisting workers in assembly, retrieving tools, managing logistics, conducting equipment inspections, and coordinating multi-robot systems. As VLMs mature, robots could learn new procedures from video-and-language demonstrations, reason through long-horizon plans, and collaborate fluidly with humans without extensive reprogramming. The authors conclude that breakthroughs in efficient VLM architectures, high-quality multimodal datasets, and dependable real-time processing will be key to unlocking their full industrial impact, potentially ushering in a new era of safe, adaptive, and human-centric manufacturing.