This paper investigates the direct adaptive control of nonlinear systems using RBFN(radial basis function networks). The structure of the controller consists of a fixed PD controller and a RBFN controller in parallel. An adaptation law for the parameters of RBFN is developed based on the Lyapunov stability theory to guarantee the stability of the overall control system. The filtered tracking error between the system output and the desired output is shown to be UUB(uniformly ultimately bounded). To evaluate the performance of the controller, the proposed method is applied to the trajectory contro of the two-link manipulator.