Abstract: The motion planning issue for anthropomorphic arm is discussed. A three-level motion planning framework "joint space -movement primitive space -task space" is established through introducing movement primitive as a bridge connecting the task space and the joint space. The proposed method can not only control the motion process of anthropomorphic arm, but can also simplify the motion planning of complicated operation tasks. On the basis of the abstract movement primitive, a specific human arm triangle model is proposed to describe the state of anthropomorphic arm. Through introducing the notion of the working plane of the arm, the forward and inverse kinematics among joint space, human arm triangle space, and task space are derived and established by utilizing coordinate transformation and geometric analysis. These efforts pave the way for the design of movement primitives. Finally, the validation and feasibility of the kinematics algorithms are verified by a simulation example.