This paper presents a decentralized control approach to robotic rnanipulators. Every degree of freedom of the robotic system is served as a subsystem by using the decentralized method. First we synthsize N decentralized linear controllers from the decoupled subsystem models of the robotic system. In order to compensate for the influence of nonlinearity and coupling we introduce an adaptíve loop into every subsystem. The advantages of the control law proposed are: the controller is simple; calculation time is small; the decentralized control proposed is convenient to be implemented by parallel microprocessor system.