The high cost of gridconnected photovoltaic (PV) system is an important reason that hinders its market application. The control cost can be partly cut down by using sensorless Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT). However, the sensorless MPPT control proposed by previous literatures has drawbacks of poor estimation accuracy, bad realtime performance, and poor dynamic responses, which has great impact on the MPPT and the output performance of the whole system. Aiming at these problems, an Adaptive Sliding Mode Observer (ASMO) for estimation of photovoltaic array voltage is proposed. The external disturbance and modeling errors are suppressed while the realtime performance and the estimation accuracy are improved greatly by the proposed method. The favorable performance of the output performance and MPPT performance of the PV system based on the ASMO are validated by simulation and experimental results.