Beijing hosted China’s first fully autonomous three-a-side soccer tournament between humanoid robots on 28 June, spotlighting the country’s rapid advances in embodied artificial intelligence and robotics. Four university teams fielded child-sized Booster Robotics T1 machines that ran on proprietary algorithms without human control during 20-minute matches. Tsinghua University’s THU Robotics beat China Agricultural University’s Mountain Sea line-up 5–3 in the final to clinch the inaugural RoBoLeague title. The robots used on-board cameras and sensor arrays to track the ball, co-ordinate passing and regain their footing, though several still left the pitch on stretchers. Booster Robotics founder Cheng Hao said the event provided a real-world safety test ahead of potential mixed human-robot games. The showcase comes as China pours tens of billions of dollars into next-generation automation. Morgan Stanley projects the domestic robotics market will more than double to about $108 billion by 2028, with roughly 302 million humanoid units in use by 2050. Organisers billed the tournament as a trial run for the World Humanoid Robot Games, set for 15–17 August in Beijing.