Abstract: Human being can master rapid and continuous reaction skill for high speed targets (e.g., baseball, ping-pong ball, etc.) after a long-term training process. Taking a deep sight into this phenomenon, it is due to the fact that human being select frequently optimal movement trajectories of the arm, and then store rich knowledge or experience in brain during the training process. Inspired by this mechanism of human being, a trajectory planning method of for a 7-DOF humanoid manipulator under rapid and continuous reaction and obstacle avoidance environment is presented. Through this method, the trajectory planning problem of the humanoid manipulator for high speed targets can be transformed into a trajectory parameterization optimum problem. Considering the physical constraint and obstacles constraint conditions of the humanoid manipulator in operation, a target operation level of the humanoid manipulator for high speed targets is defined to constitute the fitness function and optimization goal, then particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to search the optimal combination of the redundant parameters of the movement trajectory. Based on these, a knowledge database of the corresponding operation environment is constructed through the trajectory parameterization optimum method, which can make the 7-DOF humanoid manipulator achieve rapid and continuous reaction operation for the high speed target. Finally, a humanoid robot for ping-pong playing is adopted as an example, and the method is employed to solve the trajectory planning problem of humanoid manipulator for ping-pong hitting. Both numerical simulation and actual humanoid robot testing results indicate that the proposed method can not only make the operation trajectory meet the physical constraint and obstacles constraint limitation of the 7-DOF humanoid manipulator, but also make the humanoid manipulator operate with rapid and continuous reaction, which demonstrates the effectiveness of this method for the trajectory planning problem studied.