Smart manufacturing and smart factories depend on automation and robotics, whereas human–robot collaboration (HRC) contributes to increasing the effectiveness and productivity of today’s and future factories. Industrial robots especially in HRC settings can be hazardous if safety is not addressed properly. In this review, we look at the collaboration levels of HRC and what safety actions have been used to address safety. One hundred and ninety-three articles were identified from which, after screening and eligibility stages, 46 articles were used for the extraction stage. Predefined parameters such as: devices, algorithms, collaboration level, safety action, and standards used for HRC were extracted. Despite close human and robot collaboration, 25% of all reviewed studies did not use any safety actions, and more than 50% did not use any standard to address safety issues. This review shows HRC trends and what kind of functionalities are lacking in today’s HRC systems. HRC systems can be a tremendously complex process; therefore, proper safety mechanisms must be addressed at an early stage of development.

Parcel sorting is becoming a significant challenge for delivery distribution centers and is mostly automated by using high-throughput sorting machinery, but manual work is still used to feed these machines by placing the parcels on the conveyor belt. In this paper, an AI-based robotic solution that automates the parcel placement task was developed. The architecture of the proposed system along with methods on how to implement it are described by using the currently available hardware and software components. The described choices lead to a well-functioning system and the gained insights will facilitate building similar systems for parcel delivery automation.