This paper presents a robust current controller for a surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous motor(SPMSM) by using a PI observer. The decoupling PI(proportional-integral) controller combined with an additional feed-forward compensation has been used for the current controller. The classical feed-forward compensation using velocity information and system parameters is not expected to achieve a robust performance against parameter uncertainties. This paper has adopted a PI observer for the feed-forward compensation to cope with parameter uncertainties without using velocity information. A simple PI observer has been designed to compensate the disturbances that represent velocity coupled terms and parameter uncertainties. Experimental results as well as computer simulations with 630W SPMSM confirm that the proposed approach can deal with the effects of the disturbance and improve the control performance.