Field & Outdoor Sector Standard

Foreword. This is the sector standard for the Field & Outdoor (FLD) application sector. It instantiates the universal sector template (VRS-GEN-002 §6.4). A Field & Outdoor Application Rating expresses, as a letter C < B < A < AA < AAA (AAA best), how suitable and safe a robot model is for outdoor field use — above the mandatory compliance floor: a model may be fully compliant with the anchor standards of Clause 2 and still receive any letter. VRS does not replace those standards; it discriminates among compliant models. The defining condition of the sector is the unstructured outdoor environment: terrain, weather, visibility, and worksite boundaries replace the walls and traffic rules of an Industrial site, so the same model behaves differently as those conditions change, and the rating is bounded to a declared environmental envelope. The rating is built so that an insurer or lender can read frequency, severity, exposure, recoverability, residual value, and correlated-cyber risk from evidence a manufacturer already produces for CE / ISO conformity (Clauses 7–8). Anchor regimes were verified against issuing-body pages on 2026-09-15 (Bibliography), including the 2024 restructuring of the agricultural automation standard into the ISO 18497 multi-part series. Numeric thresholds are not set here — they live inside the criterion rungs of VRS-FLD-201 and its data twin (VRS-FLD-501). A Field & Outdoor AR is an opinion, not a certification, and no display implies a real robot holds a Veyrum rating (VRS-GEN-006 §10). Requirements use “shall”; recommendations use “should”.

1 Scope

This Standard defines the requirements for issuing a Field & Outdoor AR: sector applicability (Clause 4), the sector hazard taxonomy (Clause 5), rubric and grade-band requirements (Clause 6), evidence requirements (Clause 7), the loss-driver mapping for insurance and finance fitness (Clause 8), protocol references (Clause 9), and a worked applicability example (Clause 10). The sector covers robots operating on unstructured outdoor terrain: autonomous and semi-autonomous agricultural machinery, construction and earth-moving robots, mining machine systems, and ground-based outdoor inspection robots.

Boundary: flying inspection platforms → AER (capability-gated); underwater → MAR; extreme-hazard emergency response → HAZ; on-road transport between sites → TRN. The scoring mathematics themselves are excluded (VRS-GEN-005/006); the sector’s scoring content lives in VRS-FLD-201.

2 Normative references

The documents below constitute requirements of this Standard where cited (dated at assessment unless stated; referencing rules per VRS-GEN-002 §7.3).

• VRS-GEN-001, Vocabulary; VRS-GEN-005, IR Methodology; VRS-GEN-006, AR Scheme; VRS-GEN-007, Sector Classification; VRS-GEN-009, Passport & Registry Schema; VRS-GEN-012, Evidence & Data Requirements (evidence grades) — all undated.
• VRS-FLD-201, Field & Outdoor AR Assessment Protocol (scoring; dated at assessment); its machine-readable data twin is VRS-FLD-501.
• VRS-GEN-008, Application of Ratings (issued-rating lifecycle). Cold-start parity and the company-wide fallback are defined in VRS-GEN-005 §6; the letter bands in VRS-GEN-006 §4.
• Anchor regime (the compliance floor VRS rates above, not a conformity floor VRS re-certifies — VRS-GEN-001 §3.5.1; verified 2026-09-15). The ISO 8373:2021 term basis is cross-referenced in Clause 3:
  • ISO 18497 series (2024) — agricultural machinery and tractors, safety of partially automated, semi-autonomous and autonomous machinery: Part 1 (design principles + vocabulary), Part 2 (obstacle protection systems), Part 3 (autonomous operating zones), Part 4 (verification methods and validation). The series replaces ISO 18497:2018 (single standard). Primary safety-floor and verification evidence lane for H1 (obstacle protection, Part 2) and H2 (operating-zone boundary, Part 3).
  • ISO 17757:2024 (Ed. 2) — earth-moving machinery and mining: autonomous and semi-autonomous machine system safety (ASAMS), including associated systems and infrastructure; general machine safety remains with ISO 20474 / ISO 19296. Primary safety-floor evidence lane for the mining and earth-moving field classes.
  • Functional safety of the safety-related parts of the control system (SRP/CS) that implement the H1 obstacle-protection and H2 zone-boundary functions (functional-safety anchors verified 2026-09-12):
    • ISO 25119 series — tractors and machinery for agriculture and forestry, SRP/CS; grades the safety function by AgPL (agricultural performance level). Current editions: ISO 25119-1:2018 + Amd 1:2020 (general principles), -2:2019, -3:2018, -4:2018 + Amd 1:2020; Parts 1/4 confirmed 2024.
    • ISO 19014 series — earth-moving machinery, functional safety; grades by MPL (machine performance level). Current editions: ISO 19014-1:2018 (Corr. 2019), ISO 19014-2:2022, ISO 19014-3:2024, ISO/TS 19014-5:2021. Where a manufacturer already holds ISO 25119 / ISO 19014 SRP/CS conformity in its machinery-regulation technical file, that artefact evidences H1/H2 (mapping, not new testing).
  • ISO 14224:2016 — collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment; the maintenance-record evidence lane for H3, H4 and H5.
  • IEC 62443-3-3:2013 — system security requirements and security levels (SL 1–4); the fleet/tele-operation cyber evidence lane for H6.
  • Regional conformity floors (anchors in evidence, not assumptions in requirements — charter §3): Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 (EU Machinery Regulation, of 14 June 2023, applicable from 20 January 2027, repealing Directive 2006/42/EC) in the EU market; the CE technical file is the corresponding evidence artefact (§7.2). Other jurisdictions’ machinery floors are [jurisdiction-specific; recorded per deployment].

3 Terms and definitions

For the purposes of this Standard, the terms in VRS-GEN-001 (aligned to ISO 8373:2021) apply, together with the following local terms:

• operating zone — the bounded area within which autonomous operation is permitted (the ISO 18497-3 concept).
• worksite — a controlled outdoor site with managed access (e.g. a mine or construction site), as distinct from open agricultural land.
• field class — a declared category of assessed field operation; at minimum one of agriculture, construction-earthmoving, mining, outdoor-inspection, each recorded as a protocol applicability field (VRS-GEN-007 §4.2).
• environmental envelope — the declared terrain, weather and visibility limits within which evidence is attributable and the letter is valid.
• field-context op-hours — observed operating hours accrued by a model within its declared field classes and environmental envelope; the FLD frequency/reliability exposure denominator (measured in hours, and reported as counts per 1,000 op-hours in Clause 8).

4 Sector applicability

4.1 FLD is an intended-use sector (VRS-GEN-007 §5.2): no capability gate applies. Applicability follows a manufacturer declaration of outdoor field use, or an assessor override with recorded evidence of material field deployment (VRS-GEN-006 §5.2). Default: not-applicable.

4.2 Minimum capability: the model can operate on unstructured outdoor terrain within a defined operating zone. Robot form is not a sector (VRS-GEN-007 §4.1): a tractor-form, tracked, wheeled, or legged model is rated under FLD by this same Standard when 4.1 holds.

4.3 The assessed envelope shall state which field classes it covers — at minimum one of: agriculture, construction-earthmoving, mining, outdoor-inspection — and its environmental envelope (terrain, weather, visibility limits), as protocol applicability fields (VRS-GEN-007 §4.2). The AR letter covers only the assessed classes and the assessed envelope; unassessed classes and conditions outside the envelope shall be displayed as not covered.

4.4 Field classes are the sector’s segments: per-field-class letters where evidence diverges materially, lowest-issued-letter display, and not-covered handling of unassessed classes follow VRS-GEN-006 §8.3 (the single home of that rule), as implemented for this sector in VRS-FLD-201. Where a model is assessed for more than one field class, the displayed sector letter shall be the lowest letter issued across the assessed classes.

4.5 Evidence shall be attributable both to a declared field class and to the environmental envelope; evidence gathered only in fair weather or on benign terrain shall not support a broader envelope claim. Where evidence does not cover the declared envelope, the envelope shall contract to the conditions actually observed rather than the score being stretched to cover conditions never seen (VRS-FLD-201 §4.3–4.4).

5 Sector hazard taxonomy

The Field & Outdoor AR shall weigh, at minimum, the following hazard groups. Each maps to the IR categories (VRS-GEN-005 §5) it draws evidence from; sector emphasis (weights) is defined in VRS-FLD-201, not here.

5.1 The hazard taxonomy shall be treated as the minimum coverage set: an assessment that omits a hazard group applicable to the declared field classes shall record the omission and its reason.

5.2 H1 (persons in the operating zone) is the sector-defining loss driver: severity shall be weighted against the multi-tonne energy of the machine, and shall be evidenced from the model’s own obstacle-protection basis (an ISO 18497-2 obstacle-protection design and its ISO 18497-4 verification record for agriculture, or the ISO 17757:2024 ASAMS file for earth-moving/mining) rather than inferred from an unrelated configuration.

5.3 H2 (zone excursion) shall rest on the model’s own operating-zone boundary system (the ISO 18497-3 domain); a bare declaration that the model “stays in its zone” shall not clear H2 without an ISO 18497-4-style boundary-integrity verification record or telemetry evidence of zero uncommanded excursions across the exposure period.

5.4 H6 (fleet connectivity) shall not be scored from evidence transferred across a different connectivity or GNSS-augmentation regime: where the assessed fleet introduces a new tele-operation link, correction service, or site network, the cyber and spoofing/jamming case shall rest on that regime’s own IEC 62443 evidence and GNSS-integrity test result.

NOTE — H5 (remote-site operation) is retained as a distinct group because a fault far from support and a fault in a seasonal duty peak carry business-interruption severity that a same-fault event in a serviced facility does not; its evidence lane is the ISO 14224:2016 maintenance/downtime record (§7.2). No incident-distribution statistic is asserted here (no verifiable per-exposure denominator is held; charter rule 3).

6 Sector Application Rating

6.1 The Field & Outdoor sector AR shall be determined per VRS-FLD-201 from the pool defined there — the sector criteria FLD-1…FLD-9 together with the contributing intrinsic criteria — as a percentage of the applicable pool; letters (C < B < A < AA < AAA, AAA best) follow VRS-GEN-006 §4. The machine-readable data twin is VRS-FLD-501.

6.2 The letter bands, the per-criterion tier ceilings, and the reserved-headroom AAA band (deliberately hard, anti-inflation) live in VRS-GEN-006 §4 and VRS-FLD-201 §7 and are not restated here.

6.3 Anchor-regime conformity (Clause 2) is scored by VRS-FLD-201 §6.1 (criterion FLD-1) on a large point range; absence of evidenced conformity scores zero on that criterion and is not a gate — the rating rewards performance above the compliance floor without substituting for it.

7 Evidence requirements

7.1 Evidence per VRS-GEN-012. Sector-relevant sources include: fleet telemetry (op-hours by terrain/weather), site incident logs, zone-excursion records, ISO 18497-4-style verification evidence, seasonal-duty reliability records, and maintenance/downtime records.

7.2 For each hazard group, an existing conformity or operational artefact should be mapped to the VRS evidence lane so that adoption costs a manufacturer a mapping rather than new testing:

7.3 Evidence shall be assessed at one of three tiers — Unverified, Verified, Certified — each criterion stating the points reachable at each tier (VRS-FLD-201 §6, §8). Where a criterion’s evidence bar is not met the criterion shall score 0 (no evidence is zero points, not a discard from the pool); a model×class with no admissible field evidence shall be displayed as not covered for that class (VRS-GEN-006 §6).

7.4 Models without sufficient model-specific field evidence shall be scored at the tier the available evidence supports and, where offered, from manufacturer-wide records under the company-wide fallback and cold-start parity of VRS-GEN-005 §6; the lower tier caps the attainable letter through the per-criterion ceilings (VRS-FLD-201 §7). Where H1 or H2 evidence rests on manufacturer declaration alone, without a validated obstacle-protection or boundary-integrity result, the assessment shall hold the criterion at its Unverified rung and record the evidence gap.

8 Loss-driver mapping (insurance and finance fitness)

8.1 Every quantity that feeds the Field & Outdoor rating shall be traceable to a loss driver and to a Robot Risk Passport field (VRS-GEN-009), so that an underwriter or lender can compute it from obtainable evidence. The mapping is:

8.2 An FLD signal that lacks an exposure denominator shall not be scored as a frequency; it shall be recorded as a descriptive attribute or elevated as a design question (VRS-GEN-202). No loss statistic shall be invented to fill a missing denominator.

8.3 The rating output shall be expressed so that it can feed an underwriting decision (rate relativity, deductible, exclusion, condition) or a credit decision (loan-to-value, residual curve, covenant), and shall be recorded in the Passport with its assessment tier, the environmental envelope covered, and evidence-basis flags (VRS-GEN-006 §9.3, VRS-GEN-009). The recorded envelope is the underwriting hook: operation outside it is an exclusion or a condition, not an implied covered risk.

8.4 Correlated and cyber-catastrophe accumulation (H6) shall be surfaced as a passport-recorded attribute: where many units of a model share one GNSS-correction service, tele-operation link, or site network, one spoofing/jamming event or one intrusion can degrade the fleet at once, so the risk does not diversify the way independent mechanical failures do. The attribute shall record whether that regime holds an IEC 62443-3-3:2013 SL statement and a GNSS-integrity test result, so an underwriter can set a per-fleet accumulation cap. This attribute is descriptive, not scored, until a fleet-loss denominator exists (VRS-GEN-202).

9 Protocol references

• VRS-FLD-201 — Field & Outdoor AR Assessment Protocol (scoring) — dated reference at assessment time; its data twin is VRS-FLD-501.
• Field & Outdoor Test Protocols (VRS-FLD-1xx) — reserved; the first planned are obstacle-protection verification and zone-boundary integrity, mirroring the anchor test regimes (ISO 18497-4) rather than duplicating them.

10 Worked example (informative) — applicability walkthrough

The following illustrates how an assessor applies Clauses 4–8 to a hypothetical model (illustrative only; VRS-GEN-006 §10; no real robot holds a Veyrum rating).

Input. A manufacturer declares an autonomous row-crop sprayer, model code FLD-AGV-04, for one field class, agriculture, with an environmental envelope “dry to light rain, daylight, ≤ 12° slope”. It holds an ISO 18497-2:2024 obstacle-protection design file with an ISO 18497-4:2024 verification record, an ISO 25119 SRP/CS AgPL grade for the obstacle-detection safety function, an EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 CE technical file, ISO 14224:2016 maintenance records, and 4,200 field-context op-hours across a 30-unit fleet with 1 recorded uncommanded zone-excursion (no contact) and 0 injury events. All op-hours were accrued in dry conditions.

Step 1 — applicability (Cl. 4). FLD is an intended-use sector (4.1), so no capability gate applies; the manufacturer’s field-use declaration makes FLD applicable. The envelope records field class agriculture and the environmental envelope (4.3). Only one class is assessed, so 4.4 lowest-letter display is trivial here.

Step 2 — envelope attribution (Cl. 4.5). All evidence is dry-condition, so a “light rain” claim is only partly supported; per 4.5 the envelope contracts toward the observed conditions rather than the score stretching. The recorded envelope narrows to “dry, daylight, ≤ 12° slope”.

Step 3 — hazard coverage (Cl. 5). H1–H6 all apply. H1 rests on the ISO 18497-2:2024 + 18497-4:2024 obstacle-protection basis, not on an unrelated configuration (5.2). H2 is evidenced by the boundary-integrity verification plus the telemetry showing 1 excursion, not a bare “stays in zone” claim (5.3). H6 is scored from the fleet’s own GNSS/connectivity evidence (5.4).

Step 4 — evidence and reuse (Cl. 7). Each hazard maps to an existing artefact via §7.2: H1→ISO 18497-2/-4 files + ISO 25119 grade; H2→ISO 18497-3/-4 boundary evidence + telemetry; H5→ISO 14224:2016 records. Adoption is a mapping, not new testing.

Step 5 — evidence tier (Cl. 7.3–7.4). The manufacturer evidence pack (ISO 18497-2/-4 obstacle-protection files, an ISO 25119 SRP/CS grade, ISO 14224:2016 records, and 4,200 field-context op-hours across a 30-unit fleet with 1 excursion and 0 injuries) supports the Verified tier; no behaviour is witnessed, so each criterion is held at its Verified ceiling (VRS-FLD-201 §7) and the Certified tier is not reached.

Step 6 — loss-driver read (Cl. 8). Zone-excursion frequency is expressed as 1 event per 4,200 op-hours ≈ 0.24 per 1,000 field-context op-hours (H2). Severity (8.1) is weighted against the machine’s mass and any adjacent roads/persons. Because the fleet shares one GNSS-correction service without a recorded IEC 62443 SL statement, 8.4 records the accumulation attribute below the target level.

Output. The rating is computed by VRS-FLD-201 (not in this document). The Passport record carries the class letter, the contracted environmental envelope, the assessment tier, the H1/H2/H6 evidence notes, and the fleet-accumulation attribute. The numeric score and band boundary come from the criterion rungs and bands of VRS-FLD-201 and are not asserted here.

Annex A (informative) — What this sector does NOT rate

Site-specific integration quality (a property of the deployment, recorded in the Passport, not of the model), operator agronomic or site-management practice, and regulatory conformity itself (the machinery-safety floor is evidenced, not re-certified).

Bibliography

• ISO 18497-1/-2/-3/-4:2024, Agricultural machinery and tractors — Safety of partially automated, semi-autonomous and autonomous machinery (iso.org std 82684/82686/82687/82688; verified 2026-09-15) — series replacing ISO 18497:2018; H1 (Part 2), H2 (Part 3), verification (Part 4).
• ISO 17757:2024 Ed. 2, Earth-moving machinery and mining — Autonomous and semi-autonomous machine system safety (ASAMS) (iso.org std 76126; verified 2026-09-15); general machine safety per ISO 20474 / ISO 19296.
• ISO 25119-1:2018 + Amd 1:2020 (iso.org 69025; confirmed 2024) with -2:2019 / -3:2018 / -4:2018 + Amd 1:2020 — agricultural SRP/CS, AgPL grading of the H1/H2 safety function.
• ISO 19014-1:2018 Corr. 2019 (iso.org 87718 family) with -2:2022 / -3:2024 / TS -5:2021 — earth-moving machinery functional safety, MPL grading of the H1/H2 safety function.
• ISO 14224:2016, Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries — Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment (iso.org std 64076) — H3/H5 maintenance lane.
• IEC 62443-3-3:2013, Security for industrial automation and control systems — System security requirements and security levels (SL 1–4) (iec.ch) — H6 cyber lane.
• ISO 8373:2021, Robotics — Vocabulary (iso.org std 75539) — robot-term basis (Clause 3).
• Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 of 14 June 2023 on machinery, repealing Directive 2006/42/EC (OJ L 165, 29.6.2023; applicable from 20 January 2027; eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1230/oj; verified 2026-09-15) — EU market floor and CE technical-file evidence lane.
• ISO 18497:2018 (iso.org std 62659) — superseded single-standard predecessor (historic).
• VRS framework research Phase 5 (internal) — FLD regime scan.

Change history