This paper is concerned with a comparative study of biped walking on rough terrains. Given a bipedal robot capable of walking on a flat ground with periodic behavior, whose motion can be described by a limit cycle with the Poincaré map, we consider whether the robot remains stable on rough terrain, in which geometrical uncertainties of the terrain are assumed to be persistent and bounded. More precisely, the l ∞ -induced norm is defined on the Poincaré map and taken as a performance measure evaluating a robot walking with the bounded persistent uncertainties. To minimize the performance measure and achieve an optimal walking performance, we further provide a systematic controller design scheme consisting of a inner-loop continuous-time controller and a outer-loop event-based controller, in which the latter is described as a sort of the l 1 optimal controller. Finally, the validity as well as the effectiveness of our proposed methods in biped walking on a rough terrain are demonstrated through simulation studies.INDEX TERMS Bipedal robots, legged locomotion, robust uneven terrain walking, limit cycle, event-based control.JONGWOO LEE (Student Member, IEEE) was born in London, U.K., in December 1988. He received the B.S. degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, in 2011, and the M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2013, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree. He was a Research Scientist with the Center for Robotics Research, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Seoul. His research interests include biomechanics, dynamics, and control of balance and locomotion of human and robot. He was a recipient of the Samsung Scholarship.