This paper proposed an adaptive robust controller based on neural networks for industrial robot manipulator (IRM). In fact, robot manipulators are a nonlinear system and in the working process, they usually bear the nonlinear fiction, payload variation external disturbance, etc. To deal with these problems, an intelligent controller which is designed based on inheriting the advantages of the robust adaptive NNs and SMC scheme to investigate to the joint position control of industrial robot manipulator. Here, the ARNNs are used to approximate the unknown dynamics without the requirement of prior knowledge. In addition, sliding mode control (SMC) is a well-known nonlinear control strategy because of its robustness. A robust term function is selected as an auxiliary controller to guarantee the stability and robustness under various environments. The adaptation laws for the weights of the ARNNs are adjusted using the Lyapunov stability theorem such that the stability of the proposed control systems is guaranteed. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methods are demonstrated by comparative simulation results.