An adaptive output feedback tracking controller for nonholonomic mobile robots is proposed to guarantee that the tracking errors are confined to an arbitrarily small ball. The major difficulties are caused by simultaneous existence of nonholonomic constraints, unknown system parameters and a quadratic term of unmeasurable states in the mobile robot dynamic system as well as their couplings. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a new adaptive control scheme including designing a new adaptive state feedback controller and two high-gain observers to estimate the unknown linear and angular velocities respectively. It is shown that the closed loop adaptive system is stable and the tracking errors are guaranteed to be within the pre-specified bounds which can be arbitrarily small. Simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.