This study proposed a new method to design a robot manipulator control system capable of tracking the trajectories of joint angles in a reasonable accuracy to cover with actual situation of varying payload, uncertain parameters, and time delay. The direct adaptive model following control method has been used to improve existing industrial robot manipulator control system design. The proposed robot manipulator controller is operated by adjusting its gains based on the response of the manipulator in such a way that the manipulator closely matches the reference model trajectories predefined by the designer. The manipulator control system studied has two loops: they are an inner loop on adaptive model following controller to compensate nonlinearity in the manipulator dynamic equation and to decouple the coupling terms and an outer loop of state feedback controller with integral action to guarantee the stability of the adaptive scheme. This adaptation algorithm is based on the hyperstability approach with an improved Lyapunov function. The coupling among joints and the nonlinearity in the dynamic equation are explicitly considered. The designed manipulator controller shows good tracking performance in various cases, load variation, parameter uncertainties. and time delay. Since the proposed adaptive control method requires only a small number of parameters to be estimated, the controller has a relatively simple structure compared to the other adaptive manipulator controllers. Therefore, the method used is expected to be well suited for a high performance robot controller under practical operation environments.