This paper develops a new Lyapunov recursive design for the tracking control problem of rigid-link electrically-driven robot manipulators with uncertainty by taking a tracking performance into account. The tracking performance is evaluated by L 2-gain from a torque level disturbance signal to a penalty signal for the tracking error between outputs of the manipulator and desired trajectories. The novelty of our approach is in the strategy to construct such a Lyapunov function recursively that ensures not only stability of a tracking error system but also an L 2-gain constraint, which provides a closed-form solution for non-linear H