Domestic industrial manipulators in China are entering a critical window from scale leadership toward technological leadership, yet intellectual property (IP) barriers — foreign dominance over the three core components, structurally imbalanced patent portfolios and a weak standards voice — remain hard constraints. Drawing on public policy, patent statistics and supply-chain data, this paper characterises the situation along four dimensions: industry scale, localisation rate, patent distribution and the structure of high-value patents. Four risks are identified: patent blockade, missing standards, supply-chain choke points and a thin ecosystem. A five-in-one autonomous innovation path is then proposed, covering patent layout with design-around, standards and testing coordination, industry university-research alliances, overseas acquisition with global R&D footprint, and policy-driven ecosystem cultivation. Autonomous innovation must move beyond body-imitation patents and reach into core components, underlying algorithms and the standards ecosystem.