Humanoid Robots in Manufacturing: A Topic Modelling Review of Current Research and Future Perspectives

In the last decades, humanoid robots have become more and more popular. At first, they were almost only used as research platforms, but with time they started to be seen as possible tools also for manufacturing. The progress in technology made them better in locomotion, manipulation, and in how they can interact with humans, so today they can be really considered for practical use in production. This thesis tries to analyze the role of humanoid robots in manufacturing with two main steps. The first part looks at the history of the main platforms developed from the 1970s until today. It shows their technical features, the goals they had, and how they are connected to industrial applications. To make this clearer, I also included some comparative tables and a timeline, so it is easier to follow the progress. The second part is based on a bibliometric study using 1,330 scientific papers collected from Scopus, covering the period from 1980 to 2025. These papers were preprocessed and then studied with Structural Topic Modeling (STM). This method helps to find hidden topics in a large number of documents. Using STM, 24 topics were identified. They include platform design, locomotion, dexterous manipulation, sensory perception, human–robot interaction, and also industrial and collaborative applications. For each topic, I checked the main keywords and the most representative papers. Then I assigned a descriptive label and studied how the topic evolved over time using the IMTP (Index of Mean Topic Proportion). To be sure about the quality of the results, I also did a validation phase, both with algorithms and manually. At the end, this thesis shows a clear map of the literature on humanoid robots in manufacturing. It helps to see how the field has changed over time and points out the main research areas and applications that are important now.