In human–robot collaborative tasks, the performance of robot path planning has a direct impact on the robot-to-human hand-over process, or even the collaboration quality. In this work, we propose an evaluation study on multiple robot path planners with different metrics and reveal their pros and cons in representative human–robot collaborative manufacturing contexts. Afterward, based on the proposed metrics, we define a cost function for the dual-arm robot to choose optimized path planning solutions with maximum efficiency for its human partner in human–robot collaboration. We implement the proposed evaluation and optimization approaches to multiple realistic human–robot collaborative manufacturing contexts. Experimental results and evaluations suggest that our approaches are able to provide positive solutions for the robot path planner selection and also open a window for exploring more complicated and general robot path planning applications to human–robot collaborative tasks in smart manufacturing contexts.