[Tyler]

Controlling a Five-link Planar Bipedal Walking Mechanism
     

Researcher Atilim Gunes Baydin has published a paper describing the evolution of central pattern
generators for the control of a five-link planar bipedal walking
mechanism (PDF format). A physical walking platform was built that
had four joints - a knee and hip joint on each leg.  Initial attempts
were made to hand-tune a stable walking gait to see if it was possible.
This proved very difficult with the walker destabilizing after a short
time. Next, controllers were evolved using genetic algorithms in a
simulated environment and then tested on the real hardware to see how
they performed in the real world. This produced a number of stable,
human-like gaits including some which were able to maintain a stable
gait even when not making use of sensory feedback.
   

http://robots.net/article/2439.html