The smart wheelchair improve the quality of life and give more freedom for people who lose the ability to walk. Path planning for smart wheelchair technology is one of an important Technology. Research method The degree of difficulty walking in the actual environment is difference. A new path planning algorithm for a kind of navigation methods to find the optimal path has been proved. Firstly the grid modeling has been established for indoor environment, and the adjacent relation with the improved A* algorithm has been used to optimal planning of global path between the two positions, then the virtual force field algorithm can be implemented for the local path planning on the way. Results and Conclusions This algorithm just needs to gather the information where you want to reach, then the smart wheelchair can automatically navigate to the destination. The experiments show that the algorithm is applied to the smart wheelchair indoor navigation system to reach the expectations and has the advantages of quick response, stable performance, easy to use and strong extensibility.