Methods for automatic and efficient location generation for cooperative motion. A method includes receiving a cooperative operation comprising a master operation and the slave operation, simulating the slave operation to obtain a slave duration between consecutive slave locations and a trajectory time to perform the slave operation, populating a plurality of potential locations along the master trajectory, generating a plurality of candidate operations in a population, for each of the plurality of candidate operations in the population, simulating a candidate operation with the slave operation to calculate an efficiency factor to perform the candidate operation and removing the candidate operation from the population when the efficiency factor is not better compared to other candidate operations in the population and returning the candidate operation remaining in the population.