There are constant adjustments made by the dozens of motors in the legs and torso to keep balance, based upon sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. That's

There are constant adjustments made by the dozens of motors in the legs and torso to keep balance, based upon sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. That's not preprogrammed. My point about a reasonably controlled environment is that in the real world, even on a "flat" stage for a show, there are enough irregularities to make complete preprogramming hopeless. I don't know enough control theory, but it could be stated that an open loop controller will be doomed to fail for a biped. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-loop_controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-loop_controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-loop_controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-loop_controller Higher level, there are sequences of commands that yield a step forward or to the side. That is almost certainly preprogrammed. When you own an asimo, the api they expose is actually really limited. For example, to lift the arm from the side to the air will only have a few states in between, and you choose which one you want. This is not low level control at all. They do this because they know Asimo is a marketing machine, not a real robot, and they don't want grad students making it fall over on youtube.