At present, many intelligent techniques have been developed by various researchers in the field of mobile robot navigation. It is the task of getting proper movement in the environment to attain said goal by detecting and avoiding the obstacle with less human interference. For effective navigational strategy, Firefly-Fuzzy hybrid algorithm is analyzed over the unstructured environment because individual technique may not guaranty for an optimal solution over all configurations. The key advantage of the proposed hybrid controller is that it combines the multiple features of the different approaches into a single controller. The simulation and experimental results are presented at the end of paper over various environmental conditions and it is compared with the standalone algorithm; it is observed that the hybrid Firefly-Fuzzy controller performs well in terms of path and time optimization. © 2019 IEEE.