Chad Clark's Open Journal : 2007-02-27

1) Trevor Blackwell's robot walks kind of like a human.

As I recall Trevor Blackwell build a seg-way-like scooter in a week (or
weekend).  He is also friends with Robert Morris Jr.  (the morris internet
worm of 1988) and Paul Graham (yahoo's store).

Now he has a "dynamically balancing" bipedal robot.  The robot needs to
track where it's center of gravity is.  They couldn't find a commercial
gyroscope that worked as well as they needed so they built one.

The video is really neat!
http://www.paulgraham.com/anybots.html

  There are of course biped robots that walk. The Honda Asimo is the best
  known. But the Asimo doesn't balance dynamically. Its walk is
  preprogrammed; if you had it walk twice across the same space, it would
  put its feet down in exactly the same place the second time. And of
  course the floor has to be hard and flat.
  
  Dynamically balancing - the way we walk - is much harder. It looks fairly
  smooth when we do it, but it's really a controlled fall.