The conventional sliding mode control(SMC) technique requires a priori knowledge of the upperbounds of disturbances or/and modeling uncertainties to assure robustness. This, however, may not to be easy to obtain in practical situation. This paper presents a new methodology, sliding mode control with disturbance estimator(SMCDE), which offers a robust control performance without a priori knowledge about the disturbance. The proposed technique is featured by an average value of the imposed disturbance over a certain period. A nonlinear spring-mass-damper system is adopted as an illustrative example, and a comparative work between the conventional technique and the present one is undertaken.