This paper presents an adaptive trajectory tracking controller for a non-holonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) in the presence of parametric uncertainty in the kinematic and dynamic models of the WMR and actuator dynamics. The adaptive non-linear control law is designed based on input–output feedback linearization technique to get asymptotically exact cancellation for the uncertainty in the given system parameters. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller, a non-adaptive controller is compared with the adaptive controller via computer simulation results. The results show satisfactory trajectory tracking performance by virtue of SPR-Lyapunov design approach. In order to verify the simulation results, a set of experiments have been carried out on a commercial mobile robot. The experimental results also show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.