For attitude tracking of quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) considering parameter uncertainty and external disturbances, a desired compensation, Robust Integral of the Sign of Error (RISE) control method with adaptive gain adjustment was developed. Firstly, the original cascaded model of quadrotor UAV attitude was derived in a strict feedback form with lumped disturbances. Secondly, the desired compensation RISE controller was designed for the quadrotor model described in strict feedback form. Finally, an adaptive law was introduced to on-line tune the sign function gain in the desired compensation RISE controller. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method has been validated through extensive simulations and comparisons.