Abs tract There are two general methods to control cooperative mechanical manipulators: centralized decentralized methods. In the decentralized method each manipulator is controlled separately without awareness of other manipulator’s situation. The effect of each manipulator to the other is considered as disturbances. In centralized method the set of cooperative manipulators is considered as an unified system and a single controller is designed for the whole system. Hence in the case that the centralized controller is used, one can either turn off the redundant actuator and compute the other actuators accordingly, or calculate all actuators such that a dynamic index become optimized. In this thesis, initially dynamical equations were obtained for a two-link cooperative manipulator in two different cases; carrying a point mass and carrying a solid object. Then, both centralized and decentralized controllers were designed for them. And simulated numerically. Regarding actuation optimization, a real-time near exact optimization algorithm was proposed and its effectiveness was evaluated by comparing its numerical results with an exact optimization approach. All the numerical results were verified through experimental setup, made for this purpose.