The artificial potential field method is usually applied to the path planning problem of driverless cars or mobile robots. For example, it has been applied for the obstacle avoidance problem of intelligent cars and the autonomous navigation system of storage robots. However, there have been few studies on its application to intelligent bridge cranes. The artificial potential field method has the advantages of being a simple algorithm with short operation times. However, it is also prone to problems of unreachable targets and local minima. Based on the analysis of the operating characteristics of bridge cranes, a two-dimensional intelligent running environment model of a bridge crane was constructed in MATLAB. According to the basic theory of the artificial potential field method, the double-layer artificial potential field method was deduced, and the path and track fuzzy processing method was proposed. These two methods were implemented in MATLAB simulations. The results showed that the improved artificial potential field method could avoid static obstacles efficiently.