Aiming at the requirement of path planning of the quadruped robot in urban gas micro-leakage inspection, a path acquisition method for gas inspection of quadruped robots based on improved A* algorithm was proposed. Firstly, the grid method was used to construct a two-dimensional working map of the quadruped robot. Then, the heuristic function of A* algorithm was improved, and the adaptive adjustment strategy was introduced to reduce the number of search nodes and make the search path less prone to local optimal. Finally, the improved A* algorithm achieved the expected effect when evaluating from path length, average search time and number of search nodes. Using MATLAB2016b as the simulation software, the simulation results show that the improved A* algorithm successfully completes the pathfinding task. Compared with the classical A * algorithm, the average search time of the improved algorithm is reduced by 52.13%, and the number of search nodes is reduced by 30.23%. The algorithm has higher search efficiency in the path planning of maps with size less than 200 × 200.