A class of robust control for flexible joint manipulators with nonlinearity mismatched uncertainty is designed based on Lyapunov approach. The uncertainties are unknown but their values are within certain prescribed sets. No statistic information of the uncertainties is imposed. The control which utilizes state transformation via virtual control is proposed. The resulting robust control guarantees practical stability for the transformed system and later the stability for the original system is proved. The designed robust control is implemented by experiments in a 2-link flexible joint manipulator.