Aiming at the obstacle avoidance and path optimization for industrial robots in complex environments, a path planning strategy for robot obstacle avoidance based on improved artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed. Firstly, aiming at the problems of lack of search ability and easy to fall into local optimum for traditional artificial bee colony algorithm, tabu search is introduced into the search process of artificial bee colony algorithm. An improved artificial bee colony algorithm based on tabu search is formed, and applied to the path planning problem of industrial robot. The results show that the improved method can obtain the optimal obstacle path of industrial robot, and the optimization speed is fast and the process is stable, which can be used to solve the problem of obstacle avoidance path planning of g industrial robot.