The goal of the path planning problem is to determine an optimal collision-free path between a start and a target point for a mobile robot in an environment surrounded by obstacles. This problem belongs to the group of hard optimization problems which can be approached by modern optimization techniques such as evolutionary algorithms. In this paper the bacterial memetic algorithm is proposed for path planning of a mobile robot. The representation used in the paper fits well to the algorithm. Memetic algorithms combine evolutionary algorithms with local search heuristics in order to speed up the evolutionary process. The bacterial memetic algorithm applies the bacterial operators instead of the genetic algorithm's crossover and mutation operator. One advantage of these operators is that they easily can handle individuals with different length. The proposed algorithm is tested in real environment. © 2011 IEEE.