China Publishes Its First Humanoid Robot Standards. The Safety Rules Come Later

China now has national standards for humanoid robots. The State Administration for Market Regulation has issued six of them: a five-part set of technical requirements covering everything from how a humanoid perceives a room to how hard it should be able to grip, plus a specification for the simulation platforms used to test them. All six are dated September 28, 2026 and take effect on April 1, 2027.

The China humanoid robot standards surfaced publicly this week, when state broadcaster CCTV ran an explainer with several of the people who wrote them, including Unitree founder Wang Xingxing. They matter because they’re China’s first attempt to give humanoid makers a shared vocabulary and a shared yardstick. They’re also narrower than the headlines suggest. They’re recommended rather than mandatory, and the dedicated safety standard isn’t one of the six.

Six documents, one “technical map”

The standards are listed on SAMR’s national standards platform with the status “about to take effect.” Part 1 sets out body composition, system architecture and common terminology; the other parts take one capability each. Titles below are our translations of the Chinese, except Part 1, whose English title SAMR publishes.

Li Jincun, secretary-general of China’s national robot standardization committee, described the set to CCTV as a closed loop “from cognition to action to verification,” with the goal of a standards system that eventually covers design, manufacturing, testing and real-world use. The simulation spec is the piece engineers may care about most: it defines a common platform architecture and test methods so that capabilities can be scored in a repeatable environment.

The numbers the drafters are pointing to

SAMR’s listing pages don’t carry the full texts, so the clearest look at what’s inside comes from the drafters themselves. Speaking to CCTV, Quan Qi, one of the authors, said the decision-making part defines four abilities: adapting information, making decisions, planning tasks and managing a knowledge base. Using the example of a robot fetching medicine for an elderly person, Quan said instruction accuracy should exceed 95% and a single action should complete within one second.

Ren Rongwei, another drafter, said the motion-control part scores accuracy, real-time performance and stability, and that a robot pushed with a rated force should recover a stable working state within one second. The task-operation part, according to the same broadcast, sets grasp success above 90% for rigid objects and above 85% for deformable or fragile ones, and force operations of more than 15 kilograms.

Those are the drafters’ descriptions on television, not figures we’ve checked against the published text. They’re still useful, because they show what China wants to measure: not how impressive a demo looks, but how often the robot gets the job done.

Unitree, UBTECH, XPENG and Xiaomi helped write them

This isn’t a rulebook handed down to the industry. The drafting list for Part 1 runs to 52 organizations, starting with the Beijing Research Institute of Automation for Machinery Industry and including Unitree, UBTECH, XPENG’s Guangzhou unit, Xiaomi’s robotics arm, Deep Robotics, EngineAI, RobotEra, Pudu, Ecovacs, ZTE and Hisense, alongside Pujiang Lab and the Beijing and Zhejiang humanoid innovation centers. The work sits with the humanoid robot subcommittee of the national robot standardization committee.

Testing and certification bodies are on the list too, including China Quality Certification Centre, GRG Metrology and SGS’s Shanghai joint venture. That’s worth noticing. A recommended standard carries no legal force on its own, but the labs that write it are the ones that will be asked to test against it.

Wang Xingxing told CCTV that every company’s humanoids currently differ enormously in size, performance, battery voltage, communications and interfaces, and that setting national standards early could speed up and regulate the whole industry, and might eventually be applied overseas as well.

China’s humanoid robot standards are recommended, not required

The “T” in GB/T marks a recommended national standard. No Chinese humanoid maker is obliged to comply, and nothing in the listings ties the standards to a sales license or a certification scheme. In practice, that means they’re more likely to show up in procurement documents and test-lab reports than in enforcement actions.

The bigger gap is safety. SAMR’s platform lists “Humanoid robot safety requirements, Part 1: General safety” only as a planned standard (plan number 20261658-T-604), in a queue that also includes datasets, test methods, reliability testing, positioning and navigation, and human-robot interaction. None of those has a published date. Safety does come up inside the perception part: Wang said that when a robot gets close to people its speed and power should drop below a safe level, giving 0.5 meters per second as an example.

That leaves China’s dedicated humanoid safety rules behind the work elsewhere. ISO’s ISO 25785-1 for legged industrial robots is still a committee draft, the EU’s Machinery Regulation applies from January 20, 2027, and South Korea has just approved a fence-free factory trial for 20 Robros humanoids to gather data for its own rules.

The date to watch is April 1, 2027. Between now and then, the real signals will be whether the general-safety part gets published, and whether Chinese makers start printing GB/T 48317 compliance on their spec sheets. Unitree’s G1 product page doesn’t mention it yet.

Frequently asked questions

What are China’s first humanoid robot national standards?

They’re six recommended national standards issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation: GB/T 48317.1 to 48317.5-2026, a five-part set of technical requirements (general, environmental perception, decision-making and planning, motion control, task operation), and GB/T 48316-2026, a specification for humanoid simulation test platforms.

When do China’s humanoid robot standards take effect?

All six were issued on September 28, 2026 and take effect on April 1, 2027, according to SAMR’s national standards platform. They were publicized in mid-October through a CCTV explainer featuring the drafters.

Are the standards mandatory for humanoid robot makers?

No. The GB/T prefix marks recommended national standards, so companies aren’t legally required to follow them. They’re likely to matter most as a reference for testing labs, certification bodies and buyers.

Do the new standards cover humanoid robot safety?

Not as a dedicated safety standard. SAMR lists a general-safety part for humanoid robots only as a planned standard with no published date. One drafter, Unitree’s Wang Xingxing, said the perception part ties sensing to safety, for example by having robots slow down near people.

Which companies helped write China’s humanoid robot standards?

SAMR lists 52 organizations as drafters of Part 1, including Unitree, UBTECH, XPENG, Xiaomi’s robotics unit, Deep Robotics, EngineAI, RobotEra, Pudu, Ecovacs, ZTE and Hisense, plus research labs, innovation centers and testing bodies such as China Quality Certification Centre.

Sources

• State Administration for Market Regulation, national standards information platform, “Technical requirements for humanoid robots, Part 1: General” (GB/T 48317.1-2026), issued September 28, 2026, effective April 1, 2027, with drafting units, drafters and related planned standards: std.samr.gov.cn
• State Administration for Market Regulation, national standards platform search listing GB/T 48316-2026 and GB/T 48317.1 to 48317.5-2026: GB/T 48316-2026 record
• CNR (China National Radio), via CCTV News, “首批人形机器人国标来了！机器人如何’动得稳干得好’？” October 15, 2026, with comments from Li Jincun, Wang Xingxing, Quan Qi and Ren Rongwei: news.cnr.cn
• Unitree, G1 product page: unitree.com/g1

All sources accessed October 16, 2026. Standard titles other than Part 1 are RoboticaGuide translations.

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Last updated: October 16, 2026. To report an error, see our corrections page. Articles are drafted with AI assistance and reviewed and edited by an editor; see our editorial policy.