By The Robo Reliance Team
For years, most of the safety conversation around mobile robots focused on the companies that build and install them. The manufacturer designs the robot to a standard. The integrator sets it up for your building. Then the robot goes live, and the question of who keeps it safe and working on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon gets a lot less attention.
That gap now has a standard of its own. A3 and ANSI have released ANSI/A3 R15.08-3-2026, Part 3: Use of IMR Applications, which completes the three-part R15.08 safety series for industrial mobile robots. A3 announced in late September that it is available. According to A3, Part 3 focuses specifically on the responsibilities of users operating mobile robot applications in the workplace.
In plain terms: Part 1 covers the robot maker. Part 2 covers integrating robots into applications and fleets. Part 3 covers the site that runs them every day.
What Part 3 is about
We are not going to summarize a 77-page standard in a blog post, and nobody should treat a blog post as a substitute for reading it. But the public descriptions are clear about the themes. Per A3 and coverage in Robotics 24/7, Part 3 provides requirements and guidance for maintaining acceptable risk throughout day-to-day operations and the life of the equipment, including risk assessment, management of change, employee training, and periodic reviews and inspections.
MarketScale summed up the key idea in its coverage: the robot maker documents the environment the robot was built for, and Part 3 makes the operating site responsible for managing changes to the environment the robot actually works in.
That last point is the one operators should sit with.
Your floor does not stay the same
The day a mobile robot fleet is commissioned is the day the site matches the plan most closely. After that, things move.
Racking gets reconfigured for peak. A new conveyor goes in. Temporary staging lanes become permanent. Lighting changes. Floors wear. Traffic patterns shift when a second shift is added or a new product line arrives. Software updates change how robots behave. Batteries and sensors age.
None of that is unusual. It is how a working building lives. But each change can affect how a mobile robot sees, moves, and stops. Part 3 reflects a simple reality: the people making those changes are the site’s own team, so the site has to manage them.
Safety and maintenance are the same conversation
Here is where we think a lot of operators will underestimate the work. Several of the activities the standard describes, such as periodic inspections, keeping risk acceptable over the life of the equipment, and training the people who work around the robots, are not separate from maintenance. They are maintenance, done with a safety lens.
A sensor that is dirty or misaligned is a performance problem and a safety problem at the same time. A bumper or stop function that is not checked on a schedule is both. A fleet that has been through three software updates and two layout changes since commissioning, with nobody revisiting the original risk assessment, is carrying risk nobody has looked at.
If your preventive maintenance program only asks “is the robot running,” it is not asking enough.
Questions to answer this quarter
Whether you run one fleet or several brands across multiple sites, these are worth working through now.
Who owns management of change? When someone moves a rack or adds a lane, who decides whether the robot application needs a review? Is that written down anywhere?
When was the risk assessment last revisited? If the honest answer is “at commissioning,” that is a gap.
What gets inspected, how often, and by whom? Sensors, stop functions, warning devices, and other safety-related components belong on a defined schedule, not checked only when something seems off.
Who is trained, and on what? Operators, maintenance staff, and anyone who works in robot traffic areas need training that matches the current setup, not the one from launch day.
Where is the record? Inspections, changes, and fixes should be logged in one place you could show an auditor, an insurer, or your own leadership.
What do your service agreements actually cover? Read them against the work above. Many cover repairs to the robot itself. Fewer cover the ongoing site-side work the standard emphasizes.
Where we fit
This is the kind of work that tends to fall between the robot maker, the integrator, and the operator’s own team. Robo Reliance is a vendor-agnostic service partner for robot fleets. We support preventive maintenance programs, inspections, field service, and the documentation discipline that keeps a fleet’s condition and history on record, across brands.
We are not a substitute for your safety team or for reading the standard yourself. We are the people who help make sure the inspections actually happen, the findings get fixed, and the record exists when someone asks for it.
If your fleet has changed since it went live, and almost every fleet has, now is a good time to look at who owns keeping it safe and running.
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Photo: Trans Russia on Unsplash