A robot manipulator is a highly nonlinear and dynamically coupled system, which is subject to the disturbances and model uncertainties. The objective of this research is to design a robust tracking controller for robot manipulators with friction. This study applies the feedforward compensation to undercompensate the friction torque and combines the proposed fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) in the feedback loop. The proposed FSMC scheme is based on the principle of SMC but with the application of fuzzy logic control, providing a simple way to achieve asymptotic stability of the system. The scheme can not only overcome the chattering problem inherent with SMC by use of fuzzifized sliding surface, but also determine the rules for fuzzy logic control using the concept of SMC. Finally, the proposed algorithms were in simulation verified on an industrial manipulator.