Abstract: According to the characteristics of humanoid robot, the complex motion planning for humanoid robot can be divided into global path planning, local motion planning and task planning. Depending on the time consumed during process of the planning, online and offline are considered as the two ways of controlling the global path planning. The performances of different searching algorithms in the Cfree space are present and analyzed and features that planning algorithms should have are proposed. Planning online is achieved through the feedback information of environment gained by vision sensors and different features on motion planning between mobile robot and humanoid robot are present. The local motion planning can be divided into three methods composed of based on model, non model and intelligent control and tasks planning existed recently are proposed. Finally, challenges of complex motion planning for humanoid robot are present.