The world’s first AI robot football match shows how far we still have to go
At first glance, it looked like a slow-motion parody of the world’s most beloved sport. On a small indoor pitch in Beijing, teams of humanoid robots wobbled across the turf, scanning the field with glowing blue eyes, tripping over their own feet, and occasionally collapsing in awkward heaps. At one point, two machines had to be stretchered off after failing to stand up again.
Yet for the engineers behind the event, this wasn’t a failure – it was a breakthrough.
Staged in June 2025, China’s first fully autonomous robot football match marked a milestone in the development of embodied artificial intelligence. Each of the robots, including several built on the well-known Nao platform, played without any remote control or manual input. [Read more…] about Can robots play football? Why AI still struggles with physical movement
