An approach is presented for designing very general adaptive motion control schemes that are very general and computationally efficient, since they do not require knowledge of either the mathematical model or the parameter values of the robot dynamics and are implemented without calculation of the inverse kinematic transformation. All of the control strategies are globally stable in the presence of bounded disturbances, and in all cases the size of the residual tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. Computer simulation results given for a PUMA 762 manipulator demonstrate that accurate and robust trajectory tracking can be achieved by using the proposed controllers. Experimental results for a PUMA 560 manipulator confirm that the control schemes provide a simple and effective means of obtaining high performance trajectory tracking.< >