In this article we present a class of position control schemes for robot manipulators based on feedback of visual information processed through artificial neural networks. We exploit the approximation capabilities of neural networks to avoid the computation of the robot inverse kinematics as well as the inverse task space–camera mapping which involves tedious calibration procedures. Our main stability result establishes rigorously that in spite of the neural network giving an approximation of these mappings, the closed‐loop system including the robot nonlinear dynamics is locally asymptotically stable provided that the Jacobian of the neural network is nonsingular. The feasibility of the proposed neural controller is illustrated through experiments on a planar robot. � 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.