The intelligent patrol car with environmental sensing and autonomous navigation is a special robot, which is mostly used for equipment defect detection in industrial areas such as the power distribution room or data center room. A path planning algorithm for the navigation system of intelligent patrol car is proposed to ensure efficient and secure navigation in the complex indoor environment, and its effect is verified by simulation and experiment. First, a patrol car platform integrated with several intelligent devices is built to achieve global localization, mapping and path planning. Then a new co-optimization on multiobjective Cauchy mutation cat swarm optimization (MOCMCSO) and artificial potential field method (APFM) is proposed to solve the multi-objective optimization problem on shortest global path length and minimum total turning-angle variation. The optimal path is written into the navigation module to drive the patrol car to move and navigate. The simulations are carried out to confirm that the method can achieve a balance between the shortest path and good path smoothness, which has less optimization time and lower fitness value compared with multi-objective cat swarm optimization (MOCSO) and multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), and is more suitable for global path planning in indoor environment. Finally, the experiments have been carried out in the data center equipment room to verify the effectiveness and superiority over the path planning algorithm on MOCMCSO.