This paper presents a unified approach to direct adaptive motion control laws for robot manipulators that have been studied during the last few years by several authors. It provides a general approach based on sensivity to demonstrate the global asymptotic stability of adaptive schemes applied to rigid multilinked manipulators. It is shown that most of the schemes fit within this framework, which presents the advantage of being more systematic than other techniques and therefore will enable a unified presentation of the several schemes proposed to date and will increase our understanding of adaptive control of robot manipulators.