At a recent symposium themed "Embodied Goodness, Collaborative Governance" focused on ethical governance for embodied intelligence, UBTECH ROBOTICS officially launched the world's first "Whitepaper on Ethical Governance of Humanoid Robot Technology" (referred to as the "Whitepaper").
The Whitepaper addresses the real-world challenges posed by the accelerated deployment of humanoid robots across industrial, commercial, and home companion sectors. It systematically outlines a comprehensive governance framework that covers the entire lifecycle of ethical risk—encompassing identification, assessment, control, testing, and review. This framework translates abstract principles of embodied intelligence ethics into actionable, concrete requirements, providing a practical and viable roadmap for the large-scale application of humanoid robots.
Among its key contributions, UBTECH ROBOTICS introduces three dedicated ethical protection objectives specifically for humanoid robots: Controllable Action (ensuring robot actions remain within the scope of effective human intervention at all times), Appropriate Anthropomorphism (calibrating human-like traits to align with functional needs while preventing substantive misidentification), and Bounded Interaction (ensuring long-term engagement does not erode human autonomous judgment or real-world relationships).
The Whitepaper also innovatively establishes a "Seven-Step Risk Management Framework," which converts abstract ethical ideals into executable, practice-ready requirements. Furthermore, it categorizes the ethical impacts of humanoid robots into eight distinct domains—such as physical action safety, cognition and autonomy, and emotion and relationships—and proposes eight corresponding risk control strategies, including elimination, restriction, and separation. By emphasizing a dual-track approach that integrates engineering technical requirements with organizational governance requirements, the framework ensures risks are managed at their source from the outset.