Robotic process automation is a cross-cutting frontier technology that has shown explosive growth in recent years, and is widely and profoundly setting off a digital transformation in many fields, becoming an important driving force of the fourth industrial revolution. However, the development of robotic process automation technology is far from mature, and there are a series of issues worth researching in basic theory, development direction, and practical application. In this paper, we sort out the development history and application status of robotic process automation, summarize its key technology system, analyze the development trend of robotic process automation in terms of cluster application of software robot, cognitive automation, driving force based on large language models, human-machine interaction, human-machine collaboration, and so on. This study can provide important direction reference for the theoretical research and engineering application of robotic process automation.