A robotic sub-sea inspection system is described. Emphasis is placed on how to use self-tuning adaptive control strategies to control the robot compliant motion. Experiments on a PUMA robotic manipulator have shown that adaptive control can greatly improve contact quality and provide much better tracking ability in an unknown environment. Also adaptive controllers can make the approach time shorter than ordinary fixed gain controllers. A coupled dynamics concept for surface contact, which is typical in an inspection task, is introduced. Implementation of an adaptive controller in VAL-2 is detailed. A supervisory control system, capable of incorporating real-time compliant motion control and written in MODULA-2, is also described.