In this paper, the stabilization problem is investigated for dynamic nonholonomic systems with unknown inertia parameters and disturbances. Firstly, the nonholonomic kinematic subsystem is transformed into a skew-symmetric form and the properties of the overall systems are discussed. Then, a robust adaptive controller is presented where adaptive control technique is used to compensate for the parametric uncertainties and sliding mode control is to suppress the bounded disturbances. The controller guarantees the outputs of the dynamic subsystem to track some bounded auxiliary signals which subsequently drive the kinematic subsystem to the origin. Simulation study on the control of a unicycle wheeled mobile robot shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.