In this paper, a motion control algorithm is developed by using fuzzy control technique, which makes a robot arm avoid unexpected obstacles when the robot is moving from the start to a goal posture. During the motion, if there exist no obstacles the robot arm moves along the pre-defined path. But if some obstacles are recognized and close to the robot arm, a fuzzy controller is activated to adjust the path of the robot arm. To show the feasibility of the developed algorithm, numerical simulations and experiments are carried out. In the experiments, redundant planar robot arms are considered for the collision avoidance test, and it was proved that the developed algorithm gives good collision avoiding performance.