Abstract: The mechanical design and kinematic analysis method of a light weight and high stiffness manipulator with 7DOFs for humanoid robot is presented.Firstly,dynamic simulation,finite element analysis and experiments testing are combined together to design a manipulator with light weight,high stiffness and compact structure.Meanwhile,look-up database and inverse kinematics calculation are used to imitate the posture of human's arm to obtain optimal inverse kinematic solution.In the proposed algorithm,the problem of the multiple solutions of the inverse kinematics brought by the redundant DOF is solved and the joints' angle which make the manipulator's posture natural can be derived conveniently.Experiments show the feasibility of the method.