Assembly in future smart factories needs to address three challenges, including human centricity, sustainability, and resilience. Conventional approaches for automation in assembly have reached a bottleneck in terms of operation automomy, leaving various tasks to continued manual labour by human operators. To ease the burden on humans both physically and intellectually, human-centric assembly enhanced by augmented robots, cognitive systems, mixed reality and collaborative intelligence, assisted by thought-driven brain robotic controls, provides a promising solution. Within the context, this keynote provides an in-depth analysis of the state of human-centric assembly and identifies potentially fruitful research directions in future smart factories. © 2025 The Author(s)