In this paper, a novel design method for adaptive tracking control is proposed for robot finger dynamics. First, the dynamics are described by considering the robot finger as a large-scale system since it has many joints and multi-degrees of freedoms (DOFs). Second, by employing the direct adaptive fuzzy approximation method to approximate the unknown and desired control input signals instead of the unknown nonlinear functions, the number of adaptive design parameters obtained in the control design process is greatly reduced. Moreover, it is shown that the designed controller can guarantee all the signals in the closed-loop system to be semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, simulations are conducted on the Puma 560 robot manipulator, and the results show the effectiveness of the developed control design approach.