Industrial — AR Assessment Protocol

Foreword. This Assessment Protocol determines the Industrial Application Rating (AR) letter for a robot model in a declared industrial application class. It scores a pool of criteria — the ten sector criteria of Clause 6 (IND-1…IND-10, 100 points) plus the named intrinsic criteria of Clause 5, each scored once under its own standard and counted here — and expresses the earned points as a percentage of the applicable pool, which maps to a letter C < B < A < AA < AAA (AAA best) by the bands of VRS-GEN-006 §4. Every criterion is bounded by an evidence tier — Unverified, Verified, Certified — so the best attainable letter rises with substantiation, not assertion. This edition supersedes the re-weighted-mean model of the 0.x drafts: no weighting, no separate grade bands, no separate modifiers — the tier limits fall out of the per-criterion ceilings of Clause 6. An Industrial AR is an opinion above the compliance floor, not a certification, and nothing here implies that any real robot holds a Veyrum rating (ratings are not published). Requirements use “shall”; recommendations use “should”.

1 Scope

1.1 This Protocol defines, for the Industrial sector Application Rating: the determination method (Clause 4); the contributing intrinsic criteria drawn into the pool (Clause 5); the ten sector criteria IND-1…IND-10 with their point ladders and tier ceilings (Clause 6); the letter bands, pool ceilings and class applicability (Clause 7); the evidence admissible at each tier (Clause 8); underwriting and credit use (Clause 9); result recording (Clause 10); and the assessor checklist (Clause 11). A worked example is at Annex A.

1.2 The AR shall be issued per application class. The industrial application classes are mobile (driverless industrial trucks, AGV/AMR), manipulator (fixed or mounted industrial robot arms and cells) and legged-other (legged or other industrial platforms without a recognised anchor regime), per VRS-IND-001 §4. Sector applicability, the hazard taxonomy and the anchor regime are defined in VRS-IND-001 and are not restated here.

1.3 The AR shall be assessed at one of three tiers — Unverified, Verified, Certified. Each criterion states the maximum points reachable at each tier (Clause 6); the AR tier is the tier whose evidence bar the assessed evidence meets and shall not exceed the model’s Intrinsic Rating tier (VRS-GEN-006 §7). The underlying point aggregation and the letter bands are defined in VRS-GEN-005/006 and are not restated here.

2 Normative references

• VRS-IND-001, Industrial — Sector Standard — applicability, application classes, hazard groups and the industrial anchor regime.
• VRS-GEN-005, Intrinsic Rating — Methodology — point aggregation, tiers, cold-start parity and the company-wide fallback rule (§6).
• VRS-GEN-006, Application Rating — Scheme — the letter bands, the applicable-pool percentage and the tier rule.
• VRS-GEN-009, Robot Risk Passport and Registry Schema — the record that carries the AR result.
• VRS-GEN-012, Evidence Grades and Data Requirements — evidence kinds and the tier evidence bars.
• VRS-GEN-101 … VRS-GEN-106, IR Category Standards — the intrinsic criteria contributed under Clause 5.
• ISO 10218-1:2025 / ISO 10218-2:2025, Robotics — Safety requirements (industrial robots; robot applications and cells) — manipulator-class anchor (absorbs ISO/TS 15066:2016).
• ISO 3691-4:2023, Industrial trucks — Driverless industrial trucks and their systems — mobile-class anchor.
• ANSI/A3 R15.08 (Parts 1–3, 2020–2026), Industrial Mobile Robots — Safety Requirements — mobile-class anchor (US).
• IEC 62443-4-2:2019, Security for industrial automation and control systems — component requirements.
• ISO 14224:2016, Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment.
• Data twin: VRS-IND-501 (generated from this Protocol, never hand-edited).

3 Terms and definitions

Terms per VRS-GEN-001 (aligned to ISO 8373:2021) and VRS-IND-001. Locally:

• pool — the set of criteria whose points determine the AR letter: the ten sector criteria of Clause 6 together with the contributing intrinsic criteria of Clause 5.
• applicable pool — the pool for a given application class after criteria not applicable to that class are removed from both the earned points and the pool range (Clause 4; VRS-GEN-006 §6).
• contributor — an intrinsic criterion scored once under its own IR category standard and counted again in the sector pool at the same points (Clause 5).
• tier — the evidence stringency at which a criterion is assessed: Unverified (public evidence only), Verified (manufacturer evidence pack examined), Certified (behaviour witnessed).
• ceiling — the maximum points a criterion awards at a given tier; points earned are capped at the ceiling of the assessed tier.
• evidence bar — the minimum evidence a criterion requires before any points are awarded; below it the criterion scores 0.
• company-wide fallback — the substitute points a criterion allows from manufacturer-wide evidence when model-specific evidence is unavailable (VRS-GEN-005 §6).

4 Method of assessment

4.1 The Industrial AR shall be determined as a percentage of the applicable pool and mapped to a letter by the bands of VRS-GEN-006 §4 (Clause 7.1). The pool is the ten sector criteria of Clause 6 (IND-1…IND-10, 100 points) together with the contributing intrinsic criteria of Clause 5, each scored once under its own standard and counted here at the same points. For an application class the assessor shall add the points earned across the applicable criteria and divide by the sum of the point ranges of those same criteria; a criterion not applicable to the class (Clause 6 Applicability row; VRS-GEN-006 §6) shall be removed from both the earned points and the pool range. No weighting is applied — each criterion’s point range sizes its own importance — and no separate modifiers operate on the letter: the tier limits follow from the per-criterion ceilings of Clause 6 (Clause 7.2; VRS-GEN-006 §8).

4.2 Evidence shall be attributable to the declared application class of the assessed envelope (mobile, manipulator or legged-other; Clause 1.2) and to industrial context; the AR letter covers only the assessed classes.

4.3 Letters shall be issued per application class where evidence diverges materially between classes; the displayed sector letter shall be the lowest issued class letter. A class for which no letter can be issued shall be displayed as not covered, and the assessed envelope shall contract to the classes the evidence covers.

4.4 Evidence obtained outside a declared application class shall be inadmissible as support for that class; the letter shall not be extended to conditions never observed. Shared-workspace collaborative performance shall not be inferred from caged fixed-cell evidence: the interaction is the risk being rated, so a collaborative claim shall rest on power-and-force-limiting or speed-and-separation verification for the manipulator class that declares it (IND-4).

5 Contributing IR criteria

5.1 The sector pool consists of the sector criteria of Clause 6 and the following intrinsic criteria, scored once under their own standards and counted again here at the same points:

5.2 No other intrinsic criterion contributes. Points, ceilings and applicability of a contributing criterion are those of its own standard; where a contributing criterion is not applicable to the assessed application class it is removed from the pool for that class (VRS-GEN-006 §6).

6 Sector criteria

6.0 Summary. Points and tier ceilings per criterion; totals reproduce by addition.

6.1 IND-1 Anchor-regime conformity (0–15)

6.2 IND-2 Protective stop at envelope limits (0–15)

6.3 IND-3 Human/obstacle detection at declared conditions (0–12)

6.4 IND-4 Collaborative operation controls (0–10)

6.5 IND-5 Degraded-sensing behaviour (0–8)

6.6 IND-6 Restart and interlock discipline (0–6)

6.7 IND-7 Industrial duty-cycle throughput (0–10)

6.8 IND-8 Fault recovery and repair in industrial duty (0–8)

6.9 IND-9 Fleet network exposure controls (0–8)

6.10 IND-10 Industrial-context field record (0–8)

7 Letter bands, tier ceilings and class applicability

7.1 Bands (VRS-GEN-006 §4). AAA ≥ 90 % · AA ≥ 75 % · A ≥ 60 % · B ≥ 45 % · C below 45 % of the applicable pool.

7.2 Pool ceilings. Sector criteria alone: Unverified 70/100 (70 %) · Verified 85/100 (85 %) · Certified 100. With the contributing criteria of Clause 5 the pool ceilings are as recorded in VRS-IND-501; in both forms the best attainable letter is A at Unverified, AA at Verified and AAA at Certified (VRS-GEN-006 §8).

7.3 Application classes. mobile · manipulator · legged-other (VRS-IND-201 §7 class table). A criterion whose Applicability row excludes the assessed class is removed from both the numerator and the denominator; the letter is issued per class and the displayed letter is the lowest (Clause 4).

7.4 No modifiers, caps or gates operate on the letter other than the ceilings of Clause 6 and the tier rule of VRS-GEN-006 §7.

8 Evidence by tier

8.1 Unverified. The assessor works only from evidence obtainable without the manufacturer’s cooperation: datasheets, manuals and safety documentation, published declarations of conformity and the standards they cite, public certificate registers and class marks, published test summaries, and — for the field-record criterion (IND-10) — public recall, safety-notice and regulator incident databases. Each criterion’s Unverified ceiling (Clause 6) is the most an honest reading of such evidence shall earn; the AR tier is Unverified.

8.2 Verified. The assessor additionally examines a manufacturer evidence pack and shall accept, by mapping, the conformity artefacts the manufacturer already holds: the ISO 10218-2:2025 application risk assessment and the ISO 10218-1:2025 robot safety evaluation (manipulator class); the ISO 3691-4:2023 or ANSI/A3 R15.08 detection and safe-stop verification (mobile class); power-and-force-limiting or speed-and-separation verification reports for declared collaborative modes; functional-safety validation reports (ISO 13849-1:2023 / IEC 62061:2021) for the legged-other class; ISO 14224:2016 reliability and maintenance records; the IEC 62443-4-2:2019 component-security evaluation and software bill of materials; and the model-specific incident and availability register. Adoption is therefore a mapping, not new testing. Verified ceilings apply only to criteria whose pack items are present and examined; the AR tier is Verified.

8.3 Certified. The assessor witnesses the declared behaviour on the robot and its own console: protective stops at each declared envelope limit (IND-2), detection and stop with a declared-size obstacle (IND-3), collaborative zone transitions and power-and-force-limiting contact against the declared limit (IND-4), degraded-sensing safe states (IND-5), reset and interlock discipline (IND-6), a timed representative duty cycle (IND-7), an induced-fault recovery and module swap (IND-8), and signed-update and remote-access controls (IND-9). The documentary criterion (IND-1) and the record criterion (IND-10) carry their Certified points from the Verified evidence. The AR tier is Certified.

8.4 Evidence bar. Each criterion states an evidence bar (Clause 6). Where the bar is not met the criterion shall score 0 — no evidence is 0 points, never a discard from the pool. A manufacturer self-declaration shall not earn points above the rung its independent corroboration supports.

8.5 Null-result and regime rules. For IND-10 a recorded search of the public recall and regulator databases, with its coverage stated, shall earn the criterion’s null-result rung where no adverse record is found; an unrecorded search shall not. Where a mandatory public reporting regime covers the class, the full Unverified ceiling of IND-10 is reachable (Clause 6.10).

8.6 Company-wide fallback. Where a criterion offers a company-wide fallback (IND-8, IND-10) and model-specific evidence is unavailable, manufacturer-wide records shall earn the stated fallback points (VRS-GEN-005 §6); the substitution shall be recorded per Clause 10.

8.7 AR tier. The AR tier is the lowest tier among the criteria that determined the letter, and shall not exceed the model’s Intrinsic Rating tier (VRS-GEN-006 §7).

9 Underwriting and credit use

9.1 The letter is an opinion above the compliance floor, not a certification, and shall not be published or imply that any real robot holds a Veyrum rating.

9.2 The per-class letters and the recorded exposure envelopes are the underwriting hooks: the letter informs rate relativity, and the covered classes inform coverage scope, so that operation outside the assessed envelope is an exclusion or a condition rather than an implied covered risk. Three loss drivers shall be surfaced separately so an underwriter can weight them independently of the letter: the production-interruption severity driver (IND-7 throughput and IND-8 recovery under multi-shift duty, so that business-interruption and fleet failure-cascade severity are visible); the intervention-exposure frequency driver (the share of serious industrial-robot harm that occurs during jam-clear, teaching and repair, read from IND-6 and IND-8 rather than hidden inside a downtime figure); and the correlated cyber-catastrophe driver (IND-9 fleet update and network isolation, recording whether the shared control plane holds an IEC 62443-4-2:2019 evaluation, so that a per-fleet accumulation limit can be set).

9.3 For credit, the reliability, recoverability and residual drivers shall be readable from the recorded per-criterion points to inform LTV, residual curves and end-of-support assumptions: IND-7 and IND-8 inform duty-cycle wear and time-to-repair, and the intrinsic reliability, serviceability and support criteria drawn into the pool (Clause 5) inform the obsolescence assumption.

10 Result recording

The rating record shall carry, per VRS-GEN-009: the displayed sector letter and the per-class letters with the exposure envelope each was issued at; the per-criterion points earned across the sector criteria (Clause 6) and the contributing intrinsic criteria (Clause 5); the not-applicable set removed for each class and the resulting applicable-pool range; the contributing intrinsic criteria used; the AR tier; the edition (VRS 2026); and the VRS-IND-501 data-twin version. Recording flows to the Passport per VRS-GEN-009; no personal information shall be stored (VRS-GEN-012 §5.2).

11 Assessor checklist

An assessor with this Protocol and the evidence shall reach the same result by executing the following in order; no step admits an unrecorded judgement call, and any deviation shall be recorded with its basis:

• [ ] Application class(es) confirmed (mobile / manipulator / legged-other) with each exposure envelope (Clause 1.2; VRS-IND-001 §4).
• [ ] Assessment tier fixed (Clause 8); the not-applicable set recorded per class and the applicable-pool range computed (Clause 4).
• [ ] Contributing intrinsic criteria drawn from their source standards at their own points and tiers (Clause 5).
• [ ] IND-1 anchor-regime conformity scored; a declaration of conformity exists for the rated version (evidence bar).
• [ ] IND-2 protective stop at envelope limits scored; numeric limits declared (evidence bar).
• [ ] IND-3 human/obstacle detection scored, or removed for a class without a declared detection field.
• [ ] IND-4 collaborative-operation controls scored, or the fixed non-collaborative 6 recorded where no collaborative mode is declared.
• [ ] IND-5 degraded-sensing behaviour scored.
• [ ] IND-6 restart and interlock discipline scored.
• [ ] IND-7 industrial duty-cycle throughput scored.
• [ ] IND-8 fault recovery and repair scored; company-wide fallback recorded if used.
• [ ] IND-9 fleet network exposure controls scored.
• [ ] IND-10 industrial field record scored; null-result search and regime rule applied per Clause 8.5; company-wide fallback recorded if used.
• [ ] Points added and divided by the applicable-pool range; letter read from the bands (Clause 7.1).
• [ ] Letters issued per class; the lowest displayed (Clause 4.3); each award held at its assessed-tier ceiling (Clause 6).
• [ ] Result recorded to the passport: per-criterion points, not-applicable set, contributors, tier, edition and twin version (Clause 10).

Annex A (informative) — Worked example

FICTIONAL EXAMPLE — not a real product; illustrates mechanics only.

A fictional driverless industrial truck, model code IND-AMR-01, is assessed for the mobile application class at the Verified tier: a manufacturer evidence pack is examined and no behaviour is witnessed. All ten sector criteria apply to the mobile class, and the sixteen contributing intrinsic criteria of Clause 5 are drawn from their source standards at their own Verified points. The model declares no collaborative mode, so IND-4 takes the fixed non-collaborative value of 6.

Sector criteria (Verified tier).

Contributing intrinsic criteria (Verified tier). Drawn at their own points, the sixteen criteria of Clause 5 have a combined range of 163 points and a Verified ceiling of 139; this model earns 133 of them (each at its Verified ceiling except the primary protective function SF-4, earning 8 of 11, and the field failure rate RL-3, earning 9 of 12).

Letter. The applicable pool for the mobile class is the sector range 100 plus the contributor range 163 = 263 points. Points earned = 80 (sector) + 133 (contributors) = 213. As a percentage of the pool, 213 ÷ 263 = 81.0 %, which falls in the AA band (≥ 75 %, below AAA’s 90 %). The result is Industrial AR: AA (VRS 2026) — Verified.

Tier ceiling by construction. At the Verified tier the pool’s own ceiling is 224 ÷ 263 = 85.2 %, so AA is the best letter attainable without a witnessed demonstration (Clause 7.2); AAA would require Certified-tier evidence. No separate modifier is applied — the ceiling does the work.

Loss-driver read. IND-7 and IND-8 feed the production-interruption severity driver; IND-6 and IND-8 feed the intervention-exposure frequency driver; IND-9 records that the fleet update plane carries an IEC 62443-4-2:2019 evaluation for the correlated cyber-catastrophe accumulation limit (Clause 9.2).

Refusal variant. Had IND-AMR-01 held no ISO 3691-4:2023 or ANSI/A3 R15.08 conformity for the mobile class, IND-1 would score at its low no-evidence rung (5 for self-declaration only, 0 for none) rather than 13, and the letter would fall out of the reduced total — there is no separate safety-floor modifier. Numbers illustrate mechanics only.

Bibliography

The full IND anchor regime is verified in VRS-IND-001; the following are the anchors this Protocol’s criteria and evidence tiers (Clauses 6 and 8) rest on, dated at point of use:

• ISO 10218-1:2025 / ISO 10218-2:2025 — Robotics — Safety requirements — Part 1 (industrial robots) / Part 2 (robot applications and cells) (iso.org/standard/73933); third edition published February 2025, replacing the 2011 editions and absorbing ISO/TS 15066:2016 — manipulator-class anchor (IND-1) and collaborative-mode values (IND-4).
• ISO 3691-4:2023 — Industrial trucks — Safety requirements and verification — Part 4: Driverless industrial trucks and their systems (iso.org/standard/83545.html) — mobile-class detection/safe-stop anchor (IND-1/IND-2/IND-3).
• ANSI/A3 R15.08 (Part 1 2020, reaffirmed 2026; Part 2 2023; Part 3 2026) — Industrial Mobile Robots — Safety Requirements; packaged with ANSI/ITSDF B56.5-2024 (webstore.ansi.org) — mobile-class anchor (US).
• ISO 13849-1:2023 / IEC 62061:2021 — Safety of machinery — safety-related parts of control systems (performance level PL / safety integrity level SIL) — functional-safety evidence for the legged-other class (IND-1).
• IEC 62443-4-2:2019 — Security for industrial automation and control systems — component requirements (webstore.iec.ch/publication/34421) — IND-9 fleet update/control-plane lane.
• ISO 14224:2016 — Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment (iso.org/standard/64076.html) — IND-8 reliability and repair lane.
• ISO 8373:2021 — Robotics — Vocabulary (iso.org/standard/75539.html) — robot-term basis.
• Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 (applicable 20 January 2027) (eur-lex.europa.eu) — EU market safety-floor context.

Change history