PID controllers with constant gains have been widely used in various control systems. But it is difficult to have uniformly good control performance in all operating conditions. In this paper, we propose a variable PID controller for robot manipulators. We divide total workspace of manipulators into several subspaces. PID controllers in each subspace are optimized using evolution strategy which is a kind of global search algorithm. In real operation, the desired trajectories may cross several subspaces and we select the corresponding gains in each subspace. The gains may have large difference on the boundary of subspaces, which may cause oscillatory motion. So we use artificial neural network to have continuous smooth gain curves to reduce the oscillatory motion. From the experimental results, although the proposed variable PID controller for robots should pay for some computational burden, we have found that the controller is more superior to the conventional constant gain PID controller.