This paper presents adaptive time-delay control (TDC) with a supervising switching technique (SST) for controlling robot manipulators. Two adaptive techniques are used to enhance the TDC. The control gain of TDC is adaptively tuned using a class of Nussbaum functions. With Nussbaum functions, compared with conventional TDC using a constant gain, the proposed control using Nussbaum functions can deal with inertia parameter variations due to the movement of a robot manipulator. The SST is used to deal with discontinuous disturbances. The proposed control is model-free, highly accurate, robust and adaptive.