A majority of industrial robots are controlled by a simple joint servo control of joint actuators. In this type of control, the performance of control is greatly influenced by the joint interaction torques including Coriolis and centrifugal forces, which act as disturbance torques to the control system. As the speed of the robot increases, the effect of this disturbance torque increases, and hence makes the high speed - high precision control more difficult to achieve. In this paper, the joint disturbance torque of robots is analyzed. The joint disturbance torque is defined using the coefficients of dynamic equation of motion, and for the case of a 2 DOF planar robot, the conditions for the minimum and maximum joint disturbance torques are identified, and the effect of link parameters and joint variables on the joint disturbance torque are examined. Then, a solution to the optimal path placement problem is propose that minimizes the joint disturbance torque during a straight line motion. The proposed method is illustrated using computer simulation. The proposed solution method can be applied to a class of robots that are controlled by independent joint servo control, which includes the vast majority of industrial robots.