Industrial Sector Standard

Foreword. This is the sector standard for the Industrial (IND) application sector — the first sector standard of the VRS library and the v1 beachhead. It instantiates the universal sector template (VRS-GEN-002 §6.4). An Industrial Application Rating expresses, as a letter C < B < A < AA < AAA (AAA best), how suitable and safe a robot model is for industrial use — above the mandatory compliance floor: a robot 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 robots. The sector’s defining exposure is the trained worker who shares a structured site with the machine, and — through shared control and update planes — the fleet that can fail together; 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 / IEC conformity (Clauses 7–8). Anchor regimes were verified against issuing-body pages on 2026-09-15 (Bibliography); numeric thresholds are not set here — they live inside the criterion rungs of VRS-IND-201 and its data twin (VRS-IND-501). An Industrial 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 an Industrial 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 Industrial sector covers robots operating in structured industrial sites with trained personnel: manufacturing cells, warehouse and logistics operation (AGV/AMR), and collaborative applications sharing workspace with workers.

Excluded: public-facing service operation (SVC), domestic use (DOM), outdoor unstructured terrain (FLD), and the scoring mathematics themselves (VRS-GEN-005/006; the sector’s scoring content lives in VRS-IND-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-IND-201, Industrial AR Assessment Protocol (scoring; dated at assessment); its machine-readable data twin is VRS-IND-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 conformity floors 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 10218-1:2025 / ISO 10218-2:2025 — Robotics — Safety requirements, Part 1 (industrial robots) and Part 2 (industrial robot applications and cells). The 2025 revision absorbed ISO/TS 15066 (collaborative requirements now live in the base standard), reframed the subject as the collaborative application rather than the robot, and added explicit cybersecurity requirements. Primary safety-floor and risk-assessment evidence lane for H1, H5.
  • ISO 3691-4:2023 — Industrial trucks — Safety requirements and verification — Part 4: Driverless industrial trucks and their systems (AGV/AMR safe-stop, detection, guidance; supersedes ISO 3691-4:2020; remote-controlled trucks are out of its scope). Evidence lane for H2.
  • ANSI/A3 R15.08-1-2020 (R2026) (Part 1, requirements for the industrial mobile robot) and ANSI/A3 R15.08-2-2023 (Part 2, requirements for IMR system(s) and application(s)) — the US industrial-mobile-robot regime (packaged in practice with R15.06 and ITSDF B56.5).
  • IEC 62443-3-3:2013 (system security requirements and security levels; seven foundational requirements FR1–FR7; SL-C at system level) and IEC 62443-4-2:2019 (technical security requirements for IACS components) — the OT / fleet cyber evidence lane for H4.
  • ISO 14224:2016 — collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment; the maintenance-record evidence lane for H3 and 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).

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:

• structured site — an industrial environment with controlled access, defined traffic rules, and trained personnel.
• collaborative mode — a declared manipulator operation in which robot and worker intentionally share workspace (the ISO 10218:2025 framing: the application, not the robot, is collaborative); a declared mode of the manipulator class, not a separate application class.
• application class — a declared category of assessed industrial operation; at minimum one of mobile, manipulator, legged-other, each recorded as a protocol applicability field (VRS-GEN-007 §4.2).
• fleet — multiple units of a model operated under one control/update regime at one or more sites; the unit of correlated-cyber and firmware-management exposure (H4).
• op-hours — observed operating hours accrued by a model within its assessed application classes and exposure envelope; the IND frequency/reliability exposure denominator (measured in hours, and reported as counts per 1,000 op-hours in Clause 8).

4 Sector applicability

4.1 IND is an intended-use sector (VRS-GEN-007 §5.2): no capability gate applies.

4.2 A model is applicable to IND when: (a) the manufacturer declares industrial use in its operating envelope; or (b) an assessor records evidence of material industrial deployment (override with rationale, VRS-GEN-006 §5.2). Default: not-applicable.

4.3 Minimum capability: the model can operate in a structured site under the site’s traffic/safety regime — as a mobile (driverless trucks, AGV/AMR), manipulator (fixed or mounted arms and cells), or legged-other (legged or other platform without a recognised anchor regime) class. Robot form is not a sector (VRS-GEN-007 §4.1): a humanoid, quadruped, arm, or truck-form model is rated under IND by this same Standard when 4.2 holds.

4.4 The assessed envelope shall state which industrial application classes it covers — at minimum one of: mobile, manipulator, legged-other — as protocol applicability fields (VRS-GEN-007 §4.2). A manipulator that shares workspace with a worker declares a collaborative mode, scored by VRS-IND-201 §6.4 (criterion IND-4); collaboration is a declared mode of the manipulator class, not a separate class. The AR letter covers only the assessed classes; unassessed classes shall be displayed as not covered.

4.5 Application classes are the sector’s segments: per-application-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-IND-201. Where a model is assessed for more than one class, the displayed sector letter shall be the lowest letter issued across the assessed classes.

5 Sector hazard taxonomy

The Industrial AR shall weigh, at minimum, the following hazard groups. Each maps to the IR categories (VRS-GEN-005 §5) it draws evidence from and to its dominant loss driver; sector emphasis (weights) is defined in VRS-IND-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 application classes shall record the omission and its reason.

5.2 H1 (human-proximity contact) is the sector-defining loss driver: severity shall be weighted against the worker who shares the workspace, and shall be evidenced from the assessed application’s own separation-distance and power-and-force-limiting basis (the ISO 10218:2025 collaborative-application clauses) rather than inferred from an unrelated configuration.

5.3 For a manipulator declaring a collaborative mode, H1 evidence shall include a validated speed-and-separation-monitoring or power-and-force-limiting result traceable to the declared application (an ISO 10218:2025 collaborative-application risk-assessment record); a bare declaration of collaborative capability shall not clear H1.

5.4 H4 (correlated cyber exposure) shall not be scored from evidence transferred across a different control or update plane: where the assessed fleet introduces a new shared plane, the cyber case shall rest on that plane’s own IEC 62443 evidence.

NOTE — H6 (maintenance and intervention) is retained as a distinct group because intervention activities remove or bypass the safeguards that protect normal operation; its evidence lane is the ISO 14224:2016 maintenance 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 Industrial sector AR shall be determined per VRS-IND-201 from the pool defined there — the sector criteria IND-1…IND-10 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-IND-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-IND-201 §7 and are not restated here.

6.3 Anchor-regime conformity (Clause 2) is scored by VRS-IND-201 §6.1 (criterion IND-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: operator incident and exposure records (op-hours), fleet reliability/uptime telemetry, site audit findings, anchor-standard conformity evidence, and warranty/service 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-IND-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 industrial evidence shall be displayed as not covered for that class (VRS-GEN-006 §6).

7.4 Models without sufficient model-specific industrial 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-IND-201 §7). Where H1 or H4 evidence rests on manufacturer declaration alone, without a validated result or an IEC 62443 security-level statement, 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 Industrial 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 IND 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 and evidence-basis flags (VRS-GEN-006 §9.3, VRS-GEN-009).

8.4 Correlated and cyber-catastrophe accumulation (H4) shall be surfaced as a passport-recorded attribute: where many units of a model share one control or update plane, one defective update or one OT intrusion can degrade or capture the fleet at once, so the risk does not diversify the way independent mechanical failures do. The attribute shall record whether that plane holds an IEC 62443-3-3:2013 system SL-C statement, 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-IND-201 — Industrial AR Assessment Protocol (scoring) — dated reference at assessment time; its data twin is VRS-IND-501.
• Industrial Test Protocols (VRS-IND-1xx) — the first are VRS-IND-101 (detection/safe-stop verification) and VRS-IND-102 (collaborative-application contact measurement), drawing on the anchor standards’ test regimes 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).

Input. A manufacturer declares a fixed-base articulated arm, model code IND-ARM-07, in the manipulator application class, declaring a collaborative mode for a hand-guided assembly task beside a worker (alongside guarded high-speed palletising in the same class). It holds an ISO 10218-1:2025 / ISO 10218-2:2025 risk assessment, a power-and-force-limiting (PFL) validation record for the collaborative task, an EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 CE technical file, an IEC 62443-4-2:2019 SL-2 component evaluation of its controller, ISO 14224:2016 maintenance records, and 40,000 op-hours across a 60-unit fleet with 2 recorded human-contact near-misses (both in intervention, H6) and 0 injury events.

Step 1 — applicability (Cl. 4). IND is an intended-use sector (4.1), so no capability gate applies; the manufacturer’s industrial-use declaration makes IND applicable (4.2). The envelope records the manipulator class with a declared collaborative mode for the hand-guided task (4.4). Per 4.5, where several classes are assessed the displayed letter is the lowest class letter; here only the manipulator class applies, so its letter is displayed.

Step 2 — hazard coverage (Cl. 5). H1–H6 all apply. H1 for the declared collaborative mode rests on the PFL validation record traceable to the declared task (5.3), so a bare “collaborative” declaration is not relied on. H4 is scored from the fleet’s own IEC 62443 evidence (5.4).

Step 3 — evidence and reuse (Cl. 7). Each hazard maps to an existing artefact via §7.2: H1→ISO 10218-2:2025 risk assessment + PFL record; H3/H6→ISO 14224:2016 records; H4→IEC 62443-4-2:2019 evaluation. Adoption is a mapping, not new testing.

Step 4 — evidence tier (Cl. 7.3–7.4). The manufacturer evidence pack (risk assessment, PFL record, IEC 62443-4-2:2019 evaluation, ISO 14224:2016 records, 40,000 op-hours across a 60-unit fleet) supports the Verified tier; no behaviour is witnessed, so each criterion is held at its Verified ceiling (VRS-IND-201 §7) and the Certified tier is not reached.

Step 5 — loss-driver read (Cl. 8). Human-contact frequency is expressed as 2 events per 40,000 op-hours = 0.05 per 1,000 op-hours (H1/H6). Severity (8.1) is weighted against the worker sharing the workspace, read from the collaborative task’s PFL basis, not from the palletising value. The fleet shares one update plane with an SL-2 (not SL-C) evaluation, so 8.4 records the accumulation attribute below the target level.

Output. The rating is computed by VRS-IND-201 (not in this document). The displayed sector letter is the lowest issued class letter (4.5). The Passport record carries the per-class letters, the application classes, the assessment tier, the H1/H4 evidence notes, and the fleet-accumulation attribute. The numeric score and band boundary come from the criterion rungs and bands of VRS-IND-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 training programs, and regulatory conformity itself (the floor is evidenced, not re-certified).

Bibliography

• ISO 10218-1:2025 / ISO 10218-2:2025, Robotics — Safety requirements — Part 1 (industrial robots) and Part 2 (industrial robot applications and cells) (iso.org std 73933; published February 2025; verified 2026-09-15 via ISO, automate.org/A3, TÜV Rheinland standard-update alert, idec.com): ISO/TS 15066 absorbed; “collaborative application” framing; explicit cybersecurity requirements.
• ISO/TS 15066:2016, Robots and robotic devices — Collaborative robots (iso.org std 62996) — historic collaborative supplement, superseded by absorption into ISO 10218:2025.
• ISO 3691-4:2023, Industrial trucks — Safety requirements and verification — Part 4: Driverless industrial trucks and their systems (iso.org std 88615; supersedes ISO 3691-4:2020) — H2 lane.
• ANSI/A3 R15.08-1-2020 (R2026), Industrial Mobile Robots — Safety Requirements — Part 1, and ANSI/A3 R15.08-2-2023, Part 2 (ansi.org webstore; packaged with R15.06 and ITSDF B56.5) — US IMR regime.
• IEC 62443-3-3:2013, Security for industrial automation and control systems — System security requirements and security levels (FR1–FR7; SL-C system), and IEC 62443-4-2:2019, Technical security requirements for IACS components (iec.ch) — H4 cyber lane.
• ISO 14224:2016, Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries — Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment (iso.org) — H3/H6 maintenance-record 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) — EU market floor and CE technical-file evidence lane.
• VRS framework research Phase 5 (internal, 2026) — sector scan; IND as baseline template sector.

Change history