Abstract An autonomous mobile robot is a robot which can move and act autonomously without the help of human assistance. Navigation problem of mobile robot in unknown environment is an interesting research area. This is a problem of deducing a path for the robot from its initial position to a given goal position without collision with the obstacles. Different methods such as fuzzy logic, neural networks etc. are used to find collision free path for mobile robot. This paper examines behavior of path planning of mobile robot using three activation functions of wavelet neural network i.e. Mexican Hat, Gaussian and Morlet wavelet functions by MATLAB. The simulation result shows that WNN has faster learning speed with respect to traditional artificial neural network.