Lift up your right leg. Put it down.

Lift up your left leg. Put it down.

Shift your weight. Rotate your hips. Swing your arms.

Suddenly, walking doesn’t seem so simple.

That’s one lesson a team of engineering students at Virginia Tech has learned as they’ve designed and programmed DARwIn. The “Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence” is the first humanoid robot from the United States to qualify for RoboCup, an international competition to promote robotics and artificial intelligence through a soccer skills competition.

The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to field a team of robots by 2050 that can defeat a world champion soccer team. Based on how much work it takes to just keep the robots upright, it could be a pretty ambitious goal.

“Just making it walk is a tremendously difficult problem,” said Karl Muecke, Tech’s graduate advisor for the DARwIn project. “It’s an extremely complicated motion, and if you try modeling it mathematically it becomes sort of a real headache. ...You have to tell it exactly what to do. There’s not really any robot that can sort of figure it out for themselves.” Read the story.