Abstract In this paper, the position tracking control problem of the servo system with nonlinear dynamic friction is issued. The nonlinear dynamic friction contains a directly immeasurable friction state variable and the uncertainty caused by incomplete parameter modeling and its variations. In order to provide the efficient solution to these control problems, we propose the composite control scheme, which consists of the robust friction state observer, the FNN approximator and the approximation error estimator with sliding mode control. In first, the sliding mode controller and the robust friction state observer is designed to estimate the unknown internal state of the LuGre friction model. Next, the FNN estimator is adopted to approximate the unknown lumped friction uncertainty. Finally, the adaptive approximation error estimator is designed to compensate the approximation error of the FNN estimator. Some simulations and experiments on the servo system assembled with ball-screw and DC servo motor are presented. Results show the remarkable performance of the proposed control scheme. The robust friction state observer can successfully identify immeasurable friction state and the FNN estimator and adaptive approximation error estimator give the robustness to the proposed control scheme against the uncertainty of the friction parameters.
