The main purpose of this paper is to propose a design approach by which some simple adaptive robust controllers can be synthesised for a class of uncertain nonlinear dynamical systems which can be transformed into uncertain strict-feedback nonlinear systems. In this paper, an improved backstepping design approach is presented to synthesising a class of continuous adaptive robust state-feedback controllers with a rather simple structure. The improved backstepping design approach can avoid the repeated differentiation problem which appears in using the conventional backstepping algorithm. In particular, it is not required to know the nonlinear upper bound functions of uncertainties. In the light of the presented approach, the state-feedback controllers can be constructed to be linear in the state, with the time-varying control gains which can be self-tuned by the adaptive laws. Similar to the conventional backstepping algorithm, the improved backstepping approach can be extended to a rather large class of uncertain nonlinear systems, and by combining the improved backstepping approach with other control methods, it may be expected to obtain a number of interesting results.