In general, it is very difficult to control motions of mechanical manipulators by usual deterministic control methods in a wide range of motions, because of complex nonlinearities of the dynamics and uncertainy of parameters of the system.
In this paper, we propose an adaptive control method to track desired trajectories wich are described by arbitrary task-oriented coordinates. Since the control method requires neither a knowledge of parameters of the system nor complicated calculation, it is easy to implement the method by a micro-computer. Effectiveness of the proposed control method is verified by several simulations. Particularly, an adaptive control law for compensating an acceleration term of the trajectory is shown to be very effective in case of tracking a trajectory of fast motion.