Abstract: A distributed cooperative motion planning method(DCMP) is proposed for the cooperative system of multiple autonomous articulated robots,which is a severe nonlinear coupling system.The decoupling cooperative motion planning problem can be decomposed into several independent subplanning of each robot by the predictive coordination variables and a decomposition-coordination method for large scale system theory.And a subsystem optimization model which can be calculated in a distributly iterative manner is obtained.Taking advantages of its global optimization characteristics and the constraint handling capability,the DCMP method solves several problems,including space-time optimization search in high-dimensional combined C-space and static-dynamic constraints handling,especially the velocity constraint problem which other methods are difficult to overcome.Simulations experiment result shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.