It’s easy to get robots to walk, but difficult to get them to walk like humans. An excerpt from Physorg.com:

“AIST researchers, like other scientific groups dedicated to robotics, have been working hard to create the ‘perfect’ walking robot and to design walking technologies that can make their robots most closely resemble the way humans walk.

This has not been easy. Developing a robot to walk like a human has been a challenge for engineers, but that has only motivated more work toward this end in robotics.

The AIST researchers focused on a few key areas of the robot to improve results. The robot’s toes now support the legs better during each stride, and the legs straighten out more.

Details about how they got ‘Miim’ to walk in a more human fashion than in previous iterations are in the paper, ‘Human-Like Walking with Toe Supporting for Humanoids,’ by Kanako Miura, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Fumio Kanehiro, Shuuji Kajita, Kenji Kaneko, and Kazuhito Yokoi.”