A unified design method is proposed in this paper to handle adaptive visual tracking control problem of robots. In the proposed scheme, the robot dynamic parameters, camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and position parameters of feature points are assumed to be uncertain. A unified kinematics model is presented to simultaneously cope with kinematics modeling problem of robots with the eye-in-hand or fixed camera configuration. Based on the unified kinematics, a unified design method is proposed to solve the visual tracking control problem of robots with the eye-in-hand or fixed camera configuration. By using the depth-independent interaction matrix framework, adaptive laws are derived to handle the unknown parameters. Lyapunov stability analysis is provided to show asymptotical convergence of image position and velocity tracking errors. To show the effectiveness of the proposed unified design method, experimental results for both camera configurations are also given. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.