Abstract An efficient path planning algorithm is required for the robot to move in a complex known and unknown environments. In the present research, the authors made an attempt to develop a path planning algorithm, that is, fast marching method (FMM) for the biped robot to move in a static environment. Once the path planning algorithm is developed, a simulation study is conducted to determine the path for the environment that consists of different number of obstacles that from different configurations for the terrain. The path planning algorithm is successfully seen to derive collision-free shortest paths in all the cases. Further, experiments are conducted on a real biped robot to test the effectiveness of the algorithm in deriving on-line collision-free path for the robot.