Abstract: An adaptive control scheme with feedforward compensation and PID feedback is developed for robotmanipulators to track a desired trajectory. The tracking precision and the ability to overcome disturbance are im-proved due to the integration part in control torque. The effect of friction and inertia of the actuator to the controlscheme is discussed. Further studies indicate that we only need to compensate the strongest interactions and nonlinearities in robotdynamics and then we can achieve a satisfactory control result simply by using PID feedback control. A computersimulator for the PUMA560 robot was given to investigate the performance of the proposed control schemes.