AbstractThis article addresses the problem of pose and force control in a cooperative system comprised of multiple n-degree-of-freedom (n-DOF) electrically driven robotic arms that move a payload. The proposed controller should be capable of maintaining the position and orientation of the payload in the desired path. In addition, the force exerted by robot end effectors on the object must remain limited. The system has unmodeled dynamics, and measuring the robot joint velocities is impossible. Therefore, a FAT-based observer–controller is designed to estimate the uncertainty and velocities based on universal approximation property of Fourier series expansion. The stability of the system is confirmed based on Lyapunov’s stability theorem. Finally, the proposed adaptive controller–observer is applied on two 3-DOF cooperative robotic arms carrying a payload, and the results are precisely analyzed. The results of the proposed approach are also compared with two state-of-art powerful approximation method.