In this paper, a robust adaptive sliding-mode control scheme for rigid robotic manipulators with arbitrary bounded input disturbances is proposed. It is shown that the prior knowledge on the upper bound of the norm of the input disturbance vector is not required in the sliding-mode controller design. An adaptive mechanism is introduced to estimate the upper bound of the norm of the input disturbance vector. The estimate is then used as a controller gain parameter to guarantee that the output tracking error asymptotically converges to zero and strong robustness with respect to bounded input disturbances can be obtained. A simulation example is given in support of the proposed control scheme.