This paper reports the work done towards planning the trajectory for cooperative crane lifts. The location of the hook points between the pick and place positions are determined using a path-planner. These are inputs to the trajectory planner. The goal of the trajectory planner is to connect all the path-points while ensuring the overshoots, velocities, accelerations and jerk for each degree of freedom to be within acceptable limits for the system. A number of alternate techniques are available for defining the trajectory between the path-points. This paper reports on the evaluation of algebraic and trigonometric splines for trajectory planning. Splines of various orders were initially evaluated for a single joint. This evaluation found that 4 th order trigonometric splines were most appropriate. Hence, this was applied to a lift problem involving the 2×4 DOF cooperative manipulator system and the results are presented.