This paper presents a system modeling, controller design and implementation for a rotational inverted pendulum system (RIPS), which is an under-actuated system and has the problem of unattainable velocity state. Two control strategies are applied to the RIPS. One is a sliding mode control method using the parameterization of both the hyperplane and the compensator for output feedback. The other is the disturbance observer which estimates disturbance and some modeling errors of RIPS with less computational effort. Some simulations and various kinds of experiments are performed in order to verify that the proposed controller has the ability to control RIPS whose velocity is assumed to be unavailable. The results of the simulations and experiments show that the proposed control system has superior performance for disturbance rejection and regulation at certain initial conditions as well as the robustness to model uncertainties.