In order to maintain robotic manipulators at a high level of performance, their controllers should be able to address nonlinearities in the closed-loop system, such as input nonlinearities. Meanwhile, computational efficiency is also required for real-time implementation. In this paper, an unknown input Bouc–Wen hysteresis control problem is investigated for robotic manipulators using adaptive control and a dynamical gain-based approach. The dynamics of hysteresis are modeled as an additional control unit in the closed-loop system and are integrated with the robotic manipulators. Two adaptive parameters are developed for improving the computational efficiency of the proposed control scheme, based on which the outputs of robotic manipulators are driven to track desired trajectories. Lyapunov theory is adopted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, the tracking error is improved from ultimately bounded to asymptotic tracking compared to most of the existing results. This is of important significance to improve the control quality of robotic manipulators with unknown input Bouc–Wen hysteresis. Numerical examples including fixed-point and trajectory controls are provided to show the validity of our method.