In the conventional sliding mode control technique, a priori knowledge of the bound of external disturbances or/and parameter uncertainties is required to assure control robustness. This, however, may not be easy to obtain in practical situation. This work presents a novel methodology, a sliding mode controller with perturbation estimator, which offers a robust control performance without a priori knowledge about the perturbations (disturbances and parameter uncertainties). The proposed technique is featured by an integrated average value of the imposed perturbation over a certain sampling period. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, a two-link robotic system is adopted and its position control performance is evaluated. In addition, a comparative work between the conventional technique and the proposed one is undertaken.