Abstract <p>this work focuses on trajectory control of the robot manipulator subjected to bounded disturbances. A hyperbolic tangent based nonsingular terminal sliding mode control has been proposed in this work for the robust trajectory control of the manipulator. The proposed control could propel the trajectory error to zero in finite time. Evidence for the stability of the proposed control is rendered leveraging the Lyapunov stability principle. Numerical experiments are carried out for a two degree of freedom robot using the proposed control to elicit the efficiency in following the reference trajectory. The simulation results show that the proposed control method offers faster convergence.</p>