Hand gesture recognition (HGR) is a natural way of Human Machine Interaction and has been applied on different areas. In this paper, we discuss 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 review several related works in the area of HGR based on different approaches including sensor based approach and vision approach. After comparing the two 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.