Adaptive control of servo actuator with nonlinear friction compensation is addressed.LuGre dynamic friction model is adopted to characterize the nonlinear friction and a new kind of sliding-mode observer is designed to estimate the internal immeasurable state of LuGre model.Based on the estimated friction state,adaptive laws are designed to identify the unknown model parameters and the external disturbances,and the system stability and asymptotic trajectory tracking performance are guaranteed by Lyapunov function.The position tracking performance is verified by the experimental results.