This paper presents a robust impedance controller design to coordinate a robot manipulator under system uncertainties while regulating external forces. By an impedance approach, the relationship between the motion and external forces is defined. Due to the system uncertainties, two kind of sliding mode control schemes based on the impedance approach are derived to ensure that the manipulator end-effector follows a desired trajectory and the force applied to end effector is regulated according to a target impendance. A stability condition is shown according to a sliding condition. To evaluate the devised control scheme, a numerical example is shown.