This paper presents an adaptive strategy for controlling chaotic systems. By employing the phase space reconstruction technique in nonlinear dynamical systems theory, the proposed strategy transfoms the nonlinear system into canonical form, and employs a nonlinear observer to estimate the uncertainties and disturbances of the nonlinear system, and then establishes a state-error-like feedback law. The developed control scheme allows chaos control in spite of modeling errors and parametric variations. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been demonstrated through its applications to two well-known chaotic systems: Duffing oscillator and Rossler chaos.