In this paper, a disturbance feedforward compensator design technique is proposed for an active magnetic bearing system subject to base motion for attenuating disturbance responses. In the consideration of the requirements on the model accuracy in the model based compensator designs, an experimental feedforward compensator design based on adaptive estimation by means of the Multiple Filtered-x least mean square(MFXLMS) algorithm is proposed. The performance and the effectiveness of the proposed technique will be presented in the succeeding paper in which the proposed technique is applied to a 2-DOF active magnetic bearing system subject to base motion.