Positioning control systems for robot arms are presented within a general framework in view of unification and classification. Treating coupling torques from other links as an external disturbance reduces the design of the control system to that of SISO servomechanisms driving each of the robot axes individually. A short survey of many control strategies proposed in the literature presents them as different methods aiming at attenuation of this disturbance. The use of disturbance observers is shown to provide a nice and simple way for that purpose. This could be applied to the improvement of actual industrial robots at the cost of slight software modifications.