Harmonic functions, by virtue of their extrema appearing only on the domain boundary, are known to have an advantage as a global potential function in the potential field based approach for robot path planning. However, a wide range of possibilities exist for the global harmonic function for a particular situation, depending on the boundary conditions. This paper conducts a comparison of two major classes of boundary conditions, namely Dirichlet and Neumann conditions, and attempts to discover their relative merits and demerits. It is found that the Neumann conditions offer a surer and faster approach to the path planning problem, though suffering from the disadvantage of occasional tendency of the planned path to graze along the domain boundary. Keywords: Harmonic function, Motion planning, Global potential. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.