Anovel adaptive robust control methodology is developed for tractory tracking control of a manipulator based on a novel adaptive robust control approach.Fault mode, joint friction and external interferences were added in the dynamics mode of manipulator, which was equivalent to secondary system being controlled. In this approach, a novel backstepping nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode controller was designed based on an integration of nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode surface and a backstepping control strategy. The global asymptotic stability of the control strategy was verified by Lyapunov function. Then, an adaptive technique was introduced to estimate the upper bound of system uncertainty and to improve the robustness of the controller. Finally, the effectiveness of the controller designed were verified by using a two degree of freedom (2-DOF)manipulator. The results show that compared with the traditional rapid nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller and backstepping nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode controller, the proposed controller has fast response speed, strong robustness, chattering of small advantages, can effectively deal with system failure and achieve high precision trajectory tracking control of robot arm.