On the outskirts of Beijing, young Chinese entrepreneur Cheng Hao sits on an indoor soccer pitch – but this turf isn’t for humans. It’s where engineers working for his start-up, Booster Robotics, train human-like robots to play soccer using artificial intelligence – dribbling, passing, shooting and blocking.

Cheng, a 37-year-old Beijinger, is at the vanguard of China’s decade-long push into humanoid robot technology.

He founded the company in 2023, inspired by the release of Tesla’s first humanoid Optimus and the then-groundbreaking ChatGPT-4, and wants to develop the world’s most advanced soccer-playing humanoids.

“There are hundreds of robot soccer teams in the world,” he told CNN. “We need to be the first one in this niche market and then go to other markets.”

China’s robot industry has accelerated since 2015, when the government listed robotics as one of the 10 sectors in a blueprint for upgrading Chinese industries and shedding its reputation as the world’s cheap-labor factory.

Today, the country has over 150 humanoid robot companies, and this number is steadily increasing, according to officials.

When CNN met Cheng in the company’s lab, engineers were fine-tuning their robots: one robot was suspended from a rope attached to the ceiling as an engineer used a remote control to make it jump and land, to test its balance.

Another engineer guided a robot as it walked around a mini-size indoor soccer field, often pausing to closely inspect its components.

The team at Booster Robotics was preparing for RoboCup, a major international tournament then just days away that would test the robots’ use of artificial intelligence to play a game.

Soccer has long been recognized as a benchmark task for scientists to test robots. The earliest testing took place in the 1990s, which led to the birth of the first RoboCup games later that decade in Nagoya, Japan. It’s now an annual event.

Peter Stone, a previous president of the competition and a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, said robot soccer requires many “fundamental capabilities,” including motion, vision, localization, collaborative strategic planning, and adversarial reasoning.

“An inspirational goal of RoboCup is to create a team of robots that can beat the best human soccer team on a real soccer field,” said Stone, who is also the chief scientist of Sony AI. “I sometimes compare it to challenges like landing a man on the moon. It is an ambitious technological challenge that can only be accomplished with the help of progress in science and engineering.”

Cheng’s obsession with soccer-playing robots began early. He grew up watching soccer and fell in love with robots in high school. His undergraduate studies included how to train robots to play soccer.

But now, Cheng is looking beyond that. “We think robots playing soccer is a test. We test a lot of technologies in the soccer game, but in the future, we will use this technology in factories or at homes,” he said.