According to the characteristics of the path planning problem of ground unmanned vehicles, a balanced whale algorithm based on harmonic quadratic optimization is proposed. Firstly, the optimization of harmony search algorithm is used to improve the population quality and global exploration ability, and fine-tuning is carried out according to the adaptability of the solution to improve the accuracy; secondly, the dynamic balance strategy and the population reconstruction mechanism are introduced to track the optimal solution state of the population to coordinate the global exploration and local development ability, and when the optimization stagnates, the reconstructed population increases the diversity, avoiding falling into the local optimization. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out based on different environments, and compared with a variety of algorithms, which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, providing a new idea for the application of whale optimization algorithm in path planning.