Autonomous tracking control is one of the fundamental challenges in the field of robotic autonomous navigation, especially for future intelligent robots. In this paper, an improved pure pur-suit control method is proposed for the path tracking control problem of a four-wheel independent steering robot. Based on the analysis of the four-wheel independent steering model, the kinematic model and the steering geometry model of the robot are established. Then the path tracking con-trol is realized by considering the correlation between the look-ahead distance and the velocity, as well as the lateral error between the robot and the reference path. The experimental results demon-strate that the improved pure pursuit control method has the advantages of small steady-state er-ror, fast response and strong robustness, which can effectively improve the accuracy of path track-ing.