Human-robot interaction patents: What kind of scholarly work (non-patent literature) is their source of knowledge?

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has led to a change in the execution of the production process, in which robotics is the key instrument for improving efficiency. All this means obligates human beings to adapt to the new procedures, and for this reason the industry is moving towards Industry 5.0, where human-machine relations become the key to research and improvement. Therefore, the aim of this work is to identify the main fields of science study that has justified patents linked to Human-Robot Interaction. For this purpose, a dataset that identifies the scholarly works that represent the non-patent literature of the patents in question has been identified and data mining and network analysis techniques have been applied. The results define Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Simulation and Engineering as the most influential, published mainly in high quality technical journals associated to the area. Therefore, it can be concluded that the fields of study of the non-patent literature are progressively developing new fields associated to four main knowledge clusters, which, in terms of scientific quality, brings robustness to the technological developments linked to Human-Robot Interaction.