Strengthening the industrial manufacturing capacity of a country and enhancing the quality and service level of high-end manufacturing are crucial for the country’s economic and social development and the improvement of its comprehensive strength. An intelligent manufacturing technology system with industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet as the core elements has developed rapidly and become an important component of the new productive force of industrial manufacturing. This study presents the application background of industrial robots in intelligent manufacturing, and reviews the operation types of industrial robots, including intelligent visual inspection, efficient grinding and polishing, flexible precision assembly, and workpiece grasping and transfer. It also examines the representative manufacturing scenarios involving industrial robots, such as the manufacturing of aerospace equipment, marine vessels, rail transit equipment, new energy vehicles, and electronic information devices. Moreover, the study explores the research progress of related common technologies from four perspectives: (1) visual perception such as environmental understanding and state perception, as well as full-size three-dimensional detection; (2) decision-making planning such as robot multi-task scheduling and non-interference collaborative planning in complex scenes; (3) motion control such as multi-robot collaborative control and robot compliant control; and (4) agile mechanisms. Furthermore, it elaborates on the development trends of industrial robot technologies in intelligent manufacturing, including large-scale dynamic scene understanding, clustered operations, flexible operations, embodied intelligence, networked collaboration, and digital twins. This study is expected to provide a basic reference for deepening research on industrial robots, promoting the development of intelligent manufacturing, and cultivating new productive forces.