K.: Evolving bipedal locomotion with genetic programming - a preliminary report

Abstract-This paper shows how Genetic Programming can be applied to the task of evolving the neural oscillators that produce the coordinated movements of human-like bipedal locomotion. In the research of biomechanical en-gineering, robotics and neurophysiology, to clarify the mechanism of human bipedal walking is of major inter-est. It serves as a basis of developing several applications such as rehabilitation tools and humanoid robots. Never-theless, because of complexity of the neuronal system that interacts with the body dynamics system to make walk-ing movements, much is left unknown about the details of locomotion mechanism. Researchers were looking for the optimal model of the neuronal system by trials and er-rors. In this paper, we applied Genetic Programming to induce the model of the nervous system automatically and showed its effectiveness by simulating a human bipedal gait with the obtained model. Our experimental results are preliminary but they show some promising evidences for further improvements.