Recent requirements for the fast and accurate motion in industrial robot manipulators need more advanced control techniques. To satisfy the requirements, importance of the force control is being continuously increased and the expensive force sensor is often installed to obtain the contact force information in practice. This information is indispensable for the force control of maintaining the desired contact force. However, the sensor cost is too high to be used in industrial applications. In this paper, it is proposed to estimate the contact force occurred between the end-effector of robots and environment in 3-D. The contact force monitoring system is developed based on the static and dynamic models of 3 DOF robot manipulators, where the contact force is described with respect to the link torque. The Extended Kalman Filter is designed and its performance is verified in simulations.