When a new industrial technology reaches commercial scale, standards become the infrastructure that makes markets work. Standards define safety requirements, testing protocols, communication interfaces, and terminology, enabling buyers to compare products, integrators to connect systems, and regulators to enforce minimum safety levels. China’s humanoid robot industry reached commercial scale in 2024-2025. In 2025, China’s national standards bodies established dedicated committees and working groups for humanoid robot standardization. This article covers what standards are being developed, who is on the committees, and why standardization matters more for humanoid robots than for conventional industrial robots.
Why Humanoid Robots Need New Standards
Conventional industrial robot standards are well-established: ISO 10218 (industrial robot safety), ISO 15066 (collaborative robot safety), IEC 61800 (servo drive performance), and dozens of application-specific standards for welding, painting, and material handling. These standards work for fixed robot arms in caged environments with predictable human-robot separation distances.
Humanoid robots operate differently. They are mobile, bipedal, dexterous, and designed to work in close physical contact with humans, the exact scenario that conventional robot safety standards were not designed for. The safety questions are different: how do you certify a robot that walks, carries objects over unpredictable terrain, and interacts physically with elderly care patients or factory workers? What minimum force limits prevent injury when a humanoid arm contacts a human? How do you test a navigation system that must handle the full complexity of unstructured indoor environments? None of these questions have answers in existing standards.
The 2025 Standardization Structure
In 2025, the China National Standardization Administration (SAC) established a Technical Committee for Humanoid Robots under TC 159 (Robotics). The committee structure includes: a plenary committee for overall coordination, working group WG1 for terminology and classification, WG2 for safety requirements, WG3 for performance testing methods, WG4 for AI and software requirements, and WG5 for communication interfaces. Committee members include: representatives from AgiBot, Unitree, UBTECH, Fourier, Leju (Humanoid companies), Siasun, Estun, Inovance (industrial robot companies), MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), and research institutions including Shenyang Institute of Automation and Harbin Institute of Technology.
Priority Standards in Development
WG2 (Safety): defining maximum joint torques, maximum walking speeds in human presence, emergency stop requirements, and collision detection specifications for humanoid robots in different operational contexts (industrial, healthcare, public). Target publication: first safety standard draft Q3 2026. WG3 (Performance Testing): standardized benchmark tasks for manipulation dexterity, locomotion stability, task success rate, and cycle time measurement. This is directly relevant to how buyers compare competing humanoids, without standardized tests, every manufacturer uses proprietary benchmarks that cannot be compared. WG4 (AI Requirements): minimum AI capability requirements for language instruction compliance, scene understanding accuracy, and failure mode behavior. WG5 (Interfaces): standardized communication protocols for humanoid integration with MES and factory control systems, building on existing OPC-UA and MQTT industrial standards.
International Coordination
China’s humanoid robot standards effort is coordinated with ISO/TC 299 (Robotics), the international body responsible for robot safety standards. China holds a significant position in ISO/TC 299, having contributed to ISO 10218 revisions and ISO 15066. The SAC humanoid committee is designed to eventually feed China-developed humanoid standards into ISO/TC 299 for international adoption, a strategy China has used successfully in other technology domains (5G standards via 3GPP, EV battery standards via IEC). If China can establish humanoid robot standards first and then promote them internationally, Chinese manufacturers benefit from designing to those standards natively while foreign competitors must adapt.
MIIT Robot Industry Development Plan
Parallel to standardization, MIIT’s 2025 robot industry development plan targets humanoid robot production scale as a national KPI. The plan sets a target of 10,000 humanoid units produced in China in 2025 (achieved), 50,000 units in 2026, and 200,000 units in 2028. These targets drive investment decisions, when manufacturers know the government expects 200,000 units by 2028, capacity investment is de-risked by implicit demand signals. Standards are part of this plan: MIIT explicitly linked standardization timelines to production scale targets, recognizing that safety certification requirements will be a procurement gating factor for enterprise and government customers.
For Chinese humanoid company context: Top 40 China Robot Rankings 2025. Safety context for industrial robots: industrial inspection China.
Sources
- SAC: Technical Committee for Humanoid Robots establishment (2025)
- MIIT: Robot Industry Development Plan 2025-2028
- ISO/TC 299: International robotics standardization coordination
- CRIA: China Robotics Industry Association standards activities report (2025)
