The obstacle is not the robot's intelligence but its ignition sources. A collaborative arm built for a clean assembly hall carries cooling fans, warm drives, plastic housings that hold static charge and connectors that spark when pulled. In a classified area each of those must be assessed and then removed, enclosed or made safe. An Ex robot is therefore not an option ticked on an order form. It is an engineering exercise, and the finished system needs its own certificate.
It is still rare. Among the roughly 85,000 certificates on the IECEx on-line certificate system in August 2026, only 65 covered robots, most of them painting robots, with inspection machines a distant second and a handful of tank cleaners. Machines certified only under the European ATEX Directive do not appear in that register, so the true population is somewhat larger, but the point stands: hazardous area robotics is a niche within a niche, and almost nothing in it is a collaborative arm of the kind now common on packaging lines.
Two certificates, two routes
Two real entries show how it is done. The FANUC CRX-10iA/L Paint, under IECEx DEK 24.0032X, is marked Ex ib pxb IIB T4 Gb for gas and Ex ib pxb IIIC T135°C Db for dust. Read as in the Ex marking guide published here earlier: intrinsic safety for the low-power circuits, pressurisation (pxb) keeping clean air inside the arm so that vapour cannot reach the electronics, gas group IIB, surface temperature limited to 135°C, and equipment protection level Gb and Db, so Zone 1 and Zone 21. Most certified robots rely on pressurisation in some form; it is the workhorse concept of the field.
The second comes from ExRobotics in the Netherlands. Its ExR-1 inspection robot, under IECEx UL 18.0030X, stacks five protection types on one machine, flameproof enclosures, increased safety, intrinsic safety, encapsulation and powder filling, for IIB T4 Gb. Its successor, the ExR-2, is certified together with its docking station under IECEx UL 21.0025X and marked simply Ex 60079-46 IIB T4 Gb. That number is the technical specification for equipment assemblies, and it is the important one for anybody thinking of converting a robot they already own. A converted robot is an assembly of certified and modified parts. Whoever performs the conversion takes responsibility for the conformity of the whole, and 60079-46 is the route by which that responsibility is documented.
For a pharmaceutical or chemical site, that is the practical choice. Purpose-built certified machines exist for tank cleaning and inspection and do those jobs well. For everything else, converting a robot the plant already knows and can already program is usually the shorter road: the atmosphere first, which zone, gas or dust group and temperature class; then the protection concept; then the assembly paperwork. Certification does not stop at the arm either. The cable carrier, the end effector, the camera and the charging station each need a place in the assessment, and a robot cleared for Zone 2 that docks in a Zone 1 charging bay has not been cleared at all.
Firms that do this work are few. Ramtec, an engineering company near the Port of Rotterdam cluster in the Netherlands, converts standard robots into explosion-proof systems and guides them through certification; its overview of the routes is at ramtec.eu. Both certificates above can be checked free at iecex-certs.com, which shows current status, standards applied and any specific conditions of use.
