Who writes the rules before thinking machines walk among us?
The standards are already written: ISO 10218, the IEEE roadmap, ASTM’s test methods, Beijing’s HEIS 2026, the EU AI Act.
The seat above them, the treaty that would bind them across borders, is still empty.
Why This Institution
Robots that think and act are entering our homes, our streets, our habits, tethered to servers that can be hacked. The rules for them are multiplying: safety standards from Geneva, a coordination roadmap from the IEEE, test methods from ASTM, and the first comprehensive national standard system from Beijing. In May 2026, Beijing went further and gave each of more than 28,000 humanoid robots a national identity code, built, in its own words, as groundwork for international mutual recognition. In July 2026, Washington moved in the opposite direction: the FCC placed foreign mobile robots on its Covered List, closing the American market to them on national-security grounds. The national layers are hardening on both sides of the Pacific. What none of this provides is the layer above the standards: the framework that makes them interoperable, binding, and enforceable across borders, before the machines are ordinary. That is what the Embodied Intelligence Coalition convenes, for humanoid robots, bipeds, quadrupeds, and every machine that thinks, decides, and reacts independently in our shared environment.
Deployment follows the economy, and in emerging industries it often outruns the regulators. The most recent mass-deployed generation of robots did not knock. It rolled in behind benign form factors, as vacuum cleaners, floor mops, lawn mowers, pool cleaners, and delivery drones, and while no one was looking over them they silently built maps of the most intimate geography a family has. The form factor is benign, so the word robot attaches to them without any of its weight. That is exactly how they crossed the threshold unexamined. The same quiet adaptation is under way outside the home: autonomous drones on the water, on land, and in the air have become ordinary before anyone decided they should be. The machines now arriving, bipeds and quadrupeds bound for schools, hospitals, and public spaces, will decide a share of their own actions in real time.
A machine certified in one jurisdiction carries no recognized identity, no valid certification, and no guaranteed override mechanism the moment it crosses into another. Aviation stood in the same place a century ago, with abundant engineering standards and legally fragmented skies, until fifty-two states signed the Chicago Convention in 1944 and created ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization. Instead of aircraft, ICAO designs the processes that build and maintain trust between people who have never met.
Governance for embodied intelligence will arrive either way: by design, before the market hardens, or by reaction, after the first systemic failure.
The realistic window for convening the equivalent body, while national frameworks remain young enough to harmonize, is two to three years.
The Founding Argument
The Governance Gap: Why Humanoid Robotics Needs Its Chicago Convention, a public working paper of July 2026, makes the Coalition's case: that machine identity, mutual recognition of certification, distributed emergency control, and evaluation of embodied intelligence can only come from a treaty-level institution. It proposes that institution by name, the Universal Intelligent Robotics Authority, and references every claim against the standards landscape of 2025 and 2026.
The Mandate
IMachine identity. A federated, mutually recognized registry tying every deployed unit to its manufacturer, operator, insurer, and jurisdiction, in real time, across borders.
IIMutual recognition. One certification, valid in every signatory market: a legal act between states, on the precedent of Article 33 of the Chicago Convention.
IIIDistributed emergency control. A common hardware-level shutdown protocol, spanning unit, fleet, and swarm, whose activation keys remain in national custody. The Authority holds the standard and the audit regime, never the keys.
IVEvaluation of embodied intelligence. Behavioral evaluation of the model controlling each unit, re-tested after every material update, as a condition of deployment. No standards regime anywhere currently requires this.
Design Principles
Built on the standards bodies. The Authority adopts proven technical standards by reference and gives them binding force, in formal liaison with ISO, IEC, IEEE, and ASTM. The engineering stays where the expertise already sits.
A civil mandate. Military systems fall outside its scope, on the precedent of the Chicago Convention: the condition that makes a declaration signable.
The keys stay national. Emergency-control custody remains with each jurisdiction. Sovereign control of machines on national soil stays sovereign.
Royalty-free by design. All protocols are published as open standards. An institution that profited from licensing what it mandates would forfeit its neutrality.
Enforced by markets. A neutral convener paired with major deployment markets whose procurement rules reference the common certification: market access as the enforcement engine.
The Council
The Founding Technical Council reviews the Universal Declaration on Embodied Intelligence and the protocol architecture, and anchors the Coalition in the disciplines it draws on. Seven seats define its composition.
- Robotics safety standardsIn formation
- Post-quantum cryptographyIn formation
- Embodied AI safety & evaluationIn formation
- International institutional lawIn formation
- Multilateral governanceIn formation
- Liability & insuranceIn formation
- Sovereign technology policyIn formation
Inquiries from recognized authorities in these fields are welcome at contact@embodiedcoalition.org.
Proposed Timeline
2026The Coalition forms, seats its Founding Technical Council, and opens liaison with the international standards bodies.
2027Protocol specifications are developed with the standards-body partners while the Universal Declaration on Embodied Intelligence is drafted; the Authority is then publicly constituted on a multilateral stage, where the founding states christen it.
2028The certification programme goes live and mutual recognition takes force across signatory markets.
For governments, standards bodies, research institutions, and editors
The Coalition was initiated by Prof. Mitar Marinović, Rector of Metropolitan University in Belgrade: institution designer, advisor to governments and cultural institutions, and author of the founding working paper.