Robotics · 22 October 2026 · 5 min read
China has published its first six national standards for humanoid robots. They take effect in April 2027
The documents cover the machine as a whole, what it perceives, how it plans, how it moves, how it handles objects, and how a simulator is to be tested. They are technical requirements, not a licence to sell. One of the companies that helped draft them is also the company advertising them.
China has published its first six national standards for humanoid robots. They are due to take effect on 1 April 2027. The numbers, as listed by UBTECH, which took part in the drafting, are GB/T 48317.1 to 48317.5 of 2026, and GB/T 48316 of 2026. In order they are a general technical requirement, then environment perception, decision and planning, motion control, and the work of handling objects, plus a specification for a simulation test platform. They sit with the national robotics standards committee, TC591, and with its humanoid subcommittee. A recommended national standard of this kind sets a common description. It is not, by itself, a permit, a safety case, or a rule that a robot may not be sold until it passes.
The split is the useful part. A humanoid announcement usually arrives as one product: the body, the model, the demo and the customer in a single sentence. These six documents pull that sentence apart. Perception is not planning. Planning is not the joints. The joints are not the hands. And a simulator that is used to claim a result has its own specification, separate from the robot that is supposed to repeat the result on a floor. A buyer who is handed a video can now ask which of the six the video is even about.
A drafter is not the referee
UBTECH says it led or joined the drafting, and that it was among the first five organisations on the motion-control and planning documents. It also repeats a Frost & Sullivan line that it leads the world in two categories of humanoid sales. That line is the company’s, attached to the standards notice. A firm that helps write a standard and then cites the standard as evidence of its own position has done two different things. The documents are real. The market ranking is a separate claim, and it is not in the standard numbers.
What a reader still cannot do is open the six texts and see a pass mark. The notice that travelled this week names the parts and the date. It does not say what a robot must score on perception, or how many times a grasp must succeed, or who is allowed to run the simulator test. Until those thresholds are in the public text, the standards are a table of contents for a regulated machine, not yet a test a factory can fail.