In order to solve the problems of local minimum and unreachable target in traditional artificial potential field method, an improved artificial potential field method is proposed.Firstly, the collision range of obstacles is introduced and the influence range of obstacles is defined by using angles to eliminate the influence of obstacles at a certain angle and distance in the forward direction of the robot.Secondly, the repulsion function is improved based on the distance between the target point and the robot to solve the target unreachable problem.Finally, the circumscribed hexagon is used to create a virtual target point outside the collision range of the obstacle to avoid the robot from falling into a local minimum.Experiment results in basic and complex environments show that the improved algorithm can overcome the defects of the traditional algorithm to some extent, and is an effective path planning algorithm.