Abstract—Hand gesture recognition (HGR) is a natural way of Human Machine Interaction and has been applied on different areas. In this paper, we discussed works done in the area of applications of HGR in industrial robots where focus is on the processing steps and techniques in gesture-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI), which can provide useful information for other researchers. We reviewed several related works in the area of HGR based on different methods including sensor based approaches and vision based approaches. After comparing the two types of approaches, we found that 3D vision-based HGR method is a challenging but promising researching area. Then concerning works of implementation of HGR in industrial scenario are discussed in detail. Pattern recognition algorithms that effectively used in HGR like k-means, DTW etc. are briefly introduced as well. Finally, after reviewing some works done in the area of designing gesture set, we proposed several principles in designing industrial hand gesture commands.