Abstract: Intelligent, green, energy saving and high efficiency have become the inevitable trend of the development of large material handling equipment such as cranes. Aiming at the problems of traditional 3D A* algorithm, such as low planning efficiency, many path inflection points and increased path complexity when the target point is surrounded by obstacles, A 3D A* path planning algorithm based on energy efficiency criteria is proposed in this paper. By optimizing the extension direction, the search direction is selected from 26 to 11, and the search efficiency is improved. By selecting key points, redundant nodes are deleted and path inflection points are reduced. By improving the evaluation function and introducing high influence factor, the path complexity is reduced. According to the distribution of obstacles, different height influence factors are set and the effective lifting energy, running time and inflection point are used as evaluation criteria to select the optimal hoisting scheme. The simulation results show that the improved 3D A* algorithm is better than the traditional 3D A* algorithm in search efficiency, number of inflection points and evaluation value. With the increase of load, the effective energy value of hoisting increases, and the path of the optimal hoisting scheme tends to the lower level.