In this paper a discrete-time observer-based approach to Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) for industrial robotic manipulators is presented and experimentally tested. In order to counteract the effects of unmodeled dynamics and disturbances, a time-delayed estimate of such effects is adopted. Remarkably, the observer is designed directly in the discrete-time domain. The performance of the proposed approach are experimentally verified on a six-degrees-of-freedom industrial robot.