Abstract For spot welding process, rational weld joints sequence can improve productivity for welding robot. Hence, intelligent path optimization strategy is introduced to obtain optimized weld joints sequence in this article. Description of welding robot path optimization is given first. Here, the shortest path length and energy consumption are considered as optimization objectives, and obstacle avoidance is set as the constraint condition. Then, the clustering guidance multi-objective particle swarm algorithm is proposed and verified, where the improved particle clustering partitioning strategy, guidance particle selection strategy, and external archive save mechanism are used. Finally, the proposed intelligent algorithm is applied to solve the spot welding robot path planning problem. Simulation results show that the proposed optimization algorithm and strategy can promise desired optimization effect.