Robot manipulators have complex dynamics and meanwhile are affected by significant uncertainties and external disturbances (perturbation). Accordingly, it is a tedious task to determine the exact mathematical model of a robot manipulator. Therefore, accurate trajectory tracking is one of the dominant features in the design of position control for robot manipulators. In this research, the main objective is to design a robust and accurate position control for a robot manipulator even in case of without exact model. For this purpose, extended state observer (ESO) based sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed to achieve the desired goal. In ESO, the main concept is to define and estimate the assumed perturbation which includes known and un-known system dynamics, uncertainties, and external disturbances. Additionally, ESO also estimates the system states. This estimated perturbation information has been used as feedback term to compensate the effect of actual perturbation, which is combined with SMC input. The perturbation compensation has improved controller performance resulting in small position error, less sensitive to perturbation, and small switching gain required for SMC. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is that it requires only partial state information, position feedback. Thus, there is no need to identify the system parameters for nominal model before the controller design. The proposed algorithm is implemented and compared with conventional SMC, and sliding mode control with sliding perturbation observer (SMCSPO) in MATLAB SimMechanics based virtual environment. The comparison results validate the robustness of the proposed technique in the presence of perturbation and show a more reduced trajectory tracking error than the conventional SMC and SMCSPO.