Two adaptive switching control strategies are proposed for the trajectory tracking problem of robotic manipulator in this paper. The first scheme is designed for the supremum of the bounded disturbance for robot manipulator being known; while the supremum is not known, the second scheme is proposed. Each proposed scheme consists of an adaptive switching law and a PD controller. Based on the Lyapunov stability theorem, it is shown that two new schemes can guarantee tracking performance of the robotic manipulator and be adapted to the alternating unknown loads. Simulations for two-link robotic manipulator are carried out and show that the two schemes can avoid the overlarge input torque, and the feasibility and validity of the proposed control schemes are proved
