Experimental biologists used the simulation model to repeat experiments which otherwise would be impossible to conduct on the vivo subjects, in order to illuminate the underlying principles of their locomotory mechanisms. The early attempt is Walknet2, which simulated the movement of walking stick insects. The follow-up works extended the standard Walknet, which only simulated the gait in a procedurally-kinematic fashion, to advanced components including searching for foot placements3 and dynamics simulation4. Other studies simulated the gait pattern of cockroaches by incorporating rudimentary motor-neuron activation and agonist/antagonist Hill-type muscle pairs5–7 to analyze the gait stability of cockroach in standard and perturbed events. However, in this model the gait pattern is limited to the horizontal plane and excludes the effect of gravity. A neuron-mechanical model of a cockroach is further proposed to simulate the individual and population behaviours of real neurons8. However the parameters in this complex model is hand-tuned and do not allow fast-extending the skill repertoire of virtual insects. Our work uses the evolutionary algorithm to automatically set the model parameters and avoids the process of manual efforts.