Review of key technologies for robot embodied intelligence oriented toward flexible manufacturing

Abstract

Flexible manufacturing, characterized by high-mix, low-volume, and highly variable production, demands robotic systems with strong adaptability, dexterity, and intelligence that conventional offline-programmed industrial robots cannot provide. This paper presents a systematic review of key technologies for robot embodied intelligence oriented toward flexible manufacturing, organized around the closed loop of perception, decision-making, and execution. The purpose is to clarify the current research landscape, identify core technical bottlenecks, and outline future directions for embodied-intelligent manufacturing. Adopting a literature-analysis and comparative-review method, the study examines representative advances at three levels: multimodal environmental perception and real-time modeling, flexible adaptive precision manipulation, and intelligent decision-making for process planning and scheduling. The review finds that multimodal fusion and semantic SLAM are overcoming perception bottlenecks, that deep learning and force/position hybrid control are balancing flexible adaptability with high-precision operation, and that deep reinforcement learning and large models are advancing intelligent process planning. It concludes that data scarcity, model reliability, software-hardware integration, and ethical-legal standards remain the principal challenges to large-scale industrial deployment.