In the era of industrial revolution 4.0 (IR4.0), robotics is a common automation tool to comply the repetitive and dangerous jobs for assisting the human workforce. Among the robotic arm, the SCARA robot is one of the well-established robots in the industry due to its high speed and high accuracy.To achieve good control at high speed, the controller is key to ensuring the SCARA robot at such a performance. This paper presents a brief review of the controllers and their pros and cons when applying to the SCARA robot. The reviewed controllers include PID Control, fuzzy logic control, neural networks control, sliding mode control, impedance control, adaptive control and robust control. Besides that, the review also covers the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) on the SCARA robot as the trend of IR 4.0.