This paper deals with the problem of self-learning cooperative motion control for the pushing task of a humanoid robot in the sagittal plane. A model with 27 linked rigid bodies is developed to simulate the system dynamics. A simple genetic algorithm(SGA) is used to find the cooperative motion, which is to minimize the total energy consumption for the entire humanoid robot body. And the multi-layer neural network based on backpropagation(BP) is also constructed and applied to generalize parameters, which are obtained from the optimization procedure by SGA, in order to control the system.