The FCC Covered List Now Catches Warehouse Robots

On 28 July 2026 the FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List, restricting equipment authorisation for import into and sale within the United States. The definitions are worth reading closely, because they are connectivity thresholds wearing a robotics label, and they land on machines that plant and warehouse managers are specifying right now.

A device is covered if it weighs more than 4.4 pounds — about 2 kilograms — and has wireless connectivity of at least 200 kilobits per second. It must also have locomotion capability, environmental sensors, wireless connectivity and software controlling navigation, perception or remote operation. The category explicitly includes autonomous mobile robots, automated guided vehicles, humanoids and quadrupeds.

What is excluded is equally clear and equally consequential: fixed industrial robots are outside the scope. Articulated arms, delta robots, gantry systems and SCARA machines are not covered. The line is drawn at whether the machine moves itself through a space it perceives, which is precisely the line between a welding cell and an intralogistics fleet.

The FCC's national security determination cites data exfiltration, surveillance, remote takeover and disruption of critical infrastructure as the risks. Equipment authorised before the listing keeps a temporary waiver for qualifying security, software and firmware updates until at least 1 January 2029.

That waiver is the detail most likely to be missed, and it is the one that belongs on a maintenance plan rather than in a procurement file. It sets a clock on the patching of already-installed fleets. An AMR fleet commissioned this year on covered hardware has a supported update path for a bounded period, after which continuing to patch it becomes a regulatory question rather than a vendor one — and an unpatched fleet of connected vehicles inside a plant is exactly the risk the listing was written about.

The practical work is inventory. Weight and radio throughput are printed on datasheets; production origin usually is not. Anyone with mobile robots in a US facility, or specifying them for one, needs to know which of the two lists each model sits on before the next fleet expansion, not after.