The aim of this paper is solving the problem of an autonomous mobile robot indoor trajectory tracking by nonlinear adaptive controller. Similar with a human driver, the adaptive control system optimizes the mobile robot movement based on Lyapunov direct method. Therefore, it can help to rapid development for self-driving industry regarding cost-effectiveness. In addition, faced with the expensive motion capture equipment, this paper introduces an cheaper experiment system with ROS-MATLAB framework and low-cost embedded hardware. The controller implementation task was finished on a practical mobile robot, Turtlebot2. In future, the technology can be applied to the self-driving car in industry, and improves the feasibility of outdoor automatic logistics.