You'll really be missing out if you don't look into the work of Emo Todorov: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov/ http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov/

You'll really be missing out if you don't look into the work of Emo Todorov: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov/ http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov/ He's done some amazing work recently in helping solve problems surrounding movement planning (not really the same as path planning like A*), so you can tell a robot to do something general like "stand here", and it treats the movement planning as an optimization problem and the dynamics of its 'body' and physics as constraints. The resulting behavior is eerily lifelike.