ISO 10218 — A Major Overhaul After 14 Years (2025)

📅 Current as of June 2026 · Overview of the latest developments in industrial robot safety standards

ISO 10218 — the foundational safety standard for industrial robots — was comprehensively revised in January 2025, for the first time in 14 years (2011 → 2025). The name is the same, but the content is effectively a new standard. Most notably, the approach to collaborative robot (cobot) safety changed fundamentally.

What Changed

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Three key changes:

1. Integration of collaborative robot safety — the cobot safety requirements that had lived in a separate Technical Specification (ISO/TS 15066) are now part of ISO 10218's normative text. Collaborative robots are no longer a special case; they are central to the standard.
2. Explicit functional safety requirements — previously implicit functional safety requirements are now stated explicitly and in detail.
3. New cybersecurity requirements — cybersecurity requirements relevant to robot safety have been added for the first time.

The page count alone illustrates the scale of this revision:

Part 2, which covers applications and robot cells, tripled from 72 to 223 pages — a direct measure of how much more detailed the real-world application requirements have become.

Why This Matters for Simulation-Based Verification

The core safety question for cobots is whether contact forces stay within human biological limits (power and force limiting). Verifying this on physical hardware requires running countless scenario combinations with instrumented dummies.

💡 The implication of the 2025 revision — as cobot safety requirements move into the normative standard and grow more detailed, the value of verifying contact forces, separation distances (SSM), and velocities in simulation before physical testing increases proportionally. Running a full sweep of body-region / posture / speed combinations in simulation to narrow the danger zones — then confining physical testing to the critical few — is the path to controlling both cost and risk.

imSim is moving toward measuring not only ISO 9283 accuracy but also cobot safety KPIs such as contact forces in simulation, with fail-loud enforcement. The standard is pointing in that direction.

In a nutshell

📌 ISO 10218 was comprehensively revised in January 2025, for the first time in 14 years, integrating collaborative robot safety (former ISO/TS 15066) into the normative text and adding explicit functional safety and cybersecurity requirements (Part 2 grew from 72 to 223 pages). As cobot safety becomes a core requirement, simulation-based safety verification becomes correspondingly more valuable.