Aiming at the difficulty of poor trajectory tracking precision and susceptible to lumped disturbances in joint space control for an industrial robot, a fastcontinuous nonsingular terminal sliding mode control strategy was proposed based on nonlinear disturbance observer. The dynamical model of a 4-DOF robot was modeled by using Lagrangian equation, by which the inputs and outputs of the system were obtained. A nonlinear disturbance observer was introduced to estimate and compensate the lumped disturbances. And a fastcontinuous nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller was designed to accelerate the convergence of the system state variables, which could improve the trajectory tracking precision in joint space. Meanwhile, the global stability of the controller was proved by using Lyapunov theory. Some simulation cases and experiments were conducted to test the efficiency of the controller. The results show that the proposed controller can be used to retrain the lumped disturbances and to ensure the trajectory tracking precision, which has a project application value.