The conventional sliding mode control (SMC) technique requires a priori knowledge of the upperbounds of disturbances and/or modeling uncertainties to assure robustness. This, however, may not be easy to obtain in practical situation. This paper presents a new methodology, a 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 and a two-link robot system are adopted as illustrative application examples. Control performances such as estimation error and tracking error are compared between the proposed methodology and conventional scheme.