Beijing's humanoid plan asks for robots that run 2,000 hours between failures, and capacity for 200,000 a year

Beijing's industry bureau published a three-year action plan for embodied AI robots on Nov. 11. By 2028 it wants at least 5 internationally leading and 10 domestically leading humanoid makers, capacity to build 200,000 robots a year in Beijing, and a Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region that holds 25% of China's humanoid capacity and sources more than 60% of key parts locally.

The capacity figure will get the headlines. The more telling part is a spec sheet. The plan wants whole robots that run more than 2,000 hours between failures, last more than 5 years, keep annual failure rates of core moving parts and end effectors under 10%, carry more than 40% of their own weight and work at least 4 hours on a battery charge. Two thousand hours is 250 eight-hour shifts, about a year on a single-shift line. A city that sets those numbers as 2028 goals is telling buyers that a humanoid cannot yet be counted on for a working year. Whether 200,000 units of capacity get used depends on closing that gap.

Factories built ahead of buyers, by design

The plan says Beijing should combine contract manufacturing with companies' own lines and build capacity "appropriately ahead" of demand. For scale, South Korea's government puts global humanoid output at about 15,000 units, 86% of them made in China. Beijing's target alone is more than 13 times that. If the region's capacity were only Beijing's 200,000, a 25% share would imply national capacity of at least 800,000 a year.

Demand, by contrast, is counted in showcases: at least 20 benchmark scenarios in industry, 20 in services and 10 in special-purpose work such as emergency rescue, and 15 solutions ready for wide rollout. The plan also asks the Beijing robotics industry association to oppose "involution-style" price competition, a worry that only arises when sellers outnumber buyers.

A dexterous hand under RMB 10,000

The parts targets are just as specific. The plan wants dexterous hands rated for 1 million cycles at rated load, with 0.1 N fingertip force resolution and a unit cost under RMB 10,000. It also wants integrated joint modules (actuators) at 100 Nm/kg and above 85% efficiency, reducers rated for more than 15,000 hours, and batteries at 350 Wh/kg that last 1,500 cycles. For training, it calls for more than 1 million hours of real-world data from at least 100 settings and new compute clusters totaling more than 50,000 PFlops.

Every robot would also carry a code. Under a "one machine, one code" system, Beijing plans to track each humanoid's identity and behavior from development and production to scrapping and recycling.