This paper investigates the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation approach for dynamic control of a three-link rigid robot manipulator that possesses ambiguous dynamics and kinematics. The task with two adaptive control schemes has been realized with the objective of task space trajectory-tracking of the end effector of the robotic manipulator. Both proposed controllers are designed by considering the joint reference velocities and the additional separation property. Based on these, the controllers can be referred to as reference velocity (RV) and reference velocity separation (RVS) adaptive controllers, respectively. The RV adaptive controller can yield better performance with proper alterations, without the cost of conventional gain choice. The HIL simulations are carried out with the aid of a model of three-link rigid robotic manipulator, developed using MATLAB/Simulink, and the RV and RVS adaptive controllers were implemented with the C2000 real-time controller. From the HIL simulation, the performance of the two adaptive controllers is analyzed for task space tracking of the robotic manipulator.