A path planning problem for a wheeled robot is considered. The problem consists in constructing a
trajectory that approximates a given ordered sequence of points on the plane and satisfies certain smoothness
requirements and curvature constraints. Such a problem arises, for example, when it is required to follow in an
automated mode a path stored as a discrete set of points measured in the course of the first passage of this path
in a manual mode. Due to errors inherent in the data points, the shape of the curve approximating the desired
path may turn out inappropriate or even unacceptable from the control standpoint. The shape of the curve can
be improved by applying the so-called fairing, which consists in moving the original data points with the aim
to minimize some functional. Adequate small variations of the data points (within the measurement error) preserve
the proximity of the resulting path to the original data points and, at the same time, may considerably
improve its shape. In the paper, a new global fairing method for improving shape of curves consisting of elementary
B-splines is proposed. The improvement is achieved through minimization of jumps of the spline third
derivative. The problem of finding desired variations reduces to solving a quadratic programming problem with
simple constraints. The discussion is illustrated by numerical examples