The artificial potential field (APF) methods provide simple and efficient motion planners for practical purposes. However, these methods have a local minimum problem, which can trap an object before reaching its goal. The local minimum problem is sometimes inevitable when an object moves in unknown environments, because the object cannot predict local minima before it detects obstacles forming the local minima. The avoidance of local minima has been an active research topic in the potential field based path planing. In this study, we propose a new concept using a virtual obstacle to escape local minima that occur in local path planning. A virtual obstacle is located around local minima to repel an object from local minima. We also propose the discrete modeling method for the modeling of arbitrary shaped objects used in this approach. This modeling method is adaptable for real-time path planning because it is reliable and provides lower complexity.