BEIJING — Chinese street dancer Wu Yufei has spent most of his 13-year career performing solo, but this year, he found some new partners — a crew of robots with sleek moves.

The 27-year-old Sichuan native, together with his fellow robot performers, has made it to the final of “America’s Got Talent” (AGT), a stage he had been hoping to reach for years.

A longstanding science-fiction fan, Wu told AFP from Pasadena, California, that dancing with robots in the group Homies gave him a “very magical feeling”.

After months of training with them, his robot dancers now feel like more than just “cold, lifeless machines”, he said.

“It almost feels as if there’s a kind of team spirit there,” Wu told AFP, as he and the dance crew of humanoids — made by Chinese robotics group Unitree — prepared for the AGT final this week.

Robot dancing has become a huge craze in China after Unitree robots performed in a breakout performance at China’s annual Spring Festival gala performance, the country’s most-watched television extravaganza.

Businesses and event planners across the country have since rushed to hire robots to perform and attract visitors.

Training robots to dance involves capturing intricate human movements, running computer simulations, and then transferring results to the robots, said industry insiders.

For Fang Zhenghua, the art director behind Wu and Unitree’s AGT performances, training a robot to dance resembles “creating a soul”.

“The impact of AI on dance performances, or the impact of robots on dancing — I was quite against it all at the beginning,” he told AFP from Shanghai.

But over time, working with the skilled engineers — who he describes as the “mothers” of the robots — changed his perspective.