Aiming at the problems that the obstacles such as ditches, ridges, stones and electric poles in paddy fields make the rice transplanter unable to ensure the continuity of operation and the straightness of rice transplanting, a path planning strategy for rice transplanter around obstacles based on optimized artificial potential field method was designed. The relative distance between the realtime position of the transplanter and the target operation point was added as the judgment condition to dynamically change the size of the potential field. At the same time, a virtual local target point was set up to make up for the algorithm defects of the target point unreachable and local minimum point of the traditional artificial potential field method. The transplanter was simplified into a two wheeled vehicle model, the mathematical model of the steering system of the transplanter was established, and the expressions of the speed, heading angle and front wheel angle of the transplanter were obtained. The lateral deviation and heading deviation were used as the factors to judge the effect of path optimization. The steering controller used the compound fuzzy PID algorithm to control the rotation angle of the transplanter, continuously reduce the deviation between the ideal front wheel rotation angle and the actual rotation angle, and realize the optimization of the rotation angle. Using ultrasonic sensor to detect road obstacles in real time and RTK-GPS to update the position coordinates in real time, the steering control strategy of rice transplanter around obstacles was designed. The obstacle avoidance path control strategy of the optimized artificial potential field method was simulated by Matlab. The results showed that when the obstacles were not within the influence range, the maximum transverse position deviation of the straight-line tracking of the rice transplanter was 5cm, the average deviation was about 2cm, and the maximum obstacle avoidance transverse deviation was less than 0.5m. The optimized algorithm had good control accuracy and can avoid the problem of unreachable target points. Based on Yangma Vp6E rice transplanter as the experimental platform, the real vehicle experiment was carried out. The experimental results showed that when the rice transplanter ran at the speed of 0.5m/s, 1.0m/s and 1.5m/s, the maximum lateral deviation of the left side obstacle was no more than 1.2218m, the maximum heading deviation was 30.1491°, the average lateral deviation of the straight line tracking before and after the obstacle was 0.025m, and the average heading deviation was 3.12°. The maximum lateral deviation of the right side obstacle was not more than 1.2459m, the maximum heading deviation was 25.2294°, the average lateral deviation of straight-line tracking before and after the obstacle was 0.023m, and the average heading deviation was 3.36°. The designed obstacle avoidance method can meet the obstacle avoidance requirements of the transplanter during driving, and had good feasibility and robustness.