On the basis of the kinematic model of a unicycle mobile robot in polar coordinates, an adaptive visual servoing strategy is proposed to regulate the mobile robot to its desired pose. By regarding the unknown depth as model uncertainty, the system error vector can be chosen as measurable signals that are reconstructed by a motion estimation technique. Then, an adaptive controller is carefully designed along with a parameter updating mechanism to compensate for the unknown depth information online. On the basis of Lyapunov techniques and LaSalle's invariance principle, rigorous stability analysis is conducted. Because the control law is elegantly designed on the basis of the polar‐coordinate‐based representation of error dynamics, the consequent maneuver behavior is natural, and the resulting path is short. Experimental results are provided to verify the performance of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.