Sensorless control of a permanent magnetsynchronous motor (PMSM) at low speed remains a challenging task. In this paper, a sensorless vector control of PMSM using a new structure of a sliding mode observer (SMO) is proposed. To remove the mechanical sensors, a full‐order (FO‐SMO) is built to estimate the rotor position and speed of PMSM drives. The FO‐SMO, which replaces a sign function by a sigmoid function, can reduce the chattering phenomenon. In order to overcome time delay, we cancel the low pass filter. This sensorless speed control shows great sensitivity to stator resistance and system noise. To improve the robustness of sensorless vector control, a full‐order SMO technique has been used for stator resistance estimation. A novel stator resistance estimator is incorporated into the sensorless drive to compensate for the effects of stator resistance variation. The validity of the proposed FO‐SMO with a 1.1 kw low‐speed PMSM sensorless vector control is demonstrated by experiments. In this paper, experimental results for FO‐SMO, back‐EMF SMO and MRAS techniques were obtained with fixed point DSP‐based (TMS320F240).