Abstract: A new path planning method based on the electric potential field method is proposed aiming at the problems of large computation and complex circuit mapping modeling in traditional path planning algorithms. Firstly, in order to reduce the complexity of environment modeling, the improved Zhang thinning algorithm is used to obtain the backbone diagram, which can depict the connectivity of the map in detail. Secondly, based on the backbone diagram, a model building method based on the electric potential field theory is proposed, and the initial route is obtained by searching the current path of the model quickly, which greatly reduces the computational complexity of the path planning algorithm. Then, the path is smoothed based on the inner fillet method to get the optimal path for the service robot, solving the problem of path discretization. A large number of comparative experiments show that the improved Zhang thinning algorithm proposed effectively reduces the complexity of modeling and solving. The proposed global path-planning algorithm based on the electric potential field solves the problem of low search efficiency of traditional algorithms.