A motor cylinder apparatus is used to transfer a load in industrial applications. The apparatus is composed of a motor and power transmission elements such as worm gear and screw. In this case, the nonlinear friction of the transmission elements has a bad influence on the position control performance. To overcome this problem, the position control system consists of a feedback controller to achieve nominal control performance and a disturbance observer to compensate nonlinear friction. Especially the filter of a disturbance observer is designed from viewpoint of robust stability. Finally, the simulation result shows that the proposed control system is effective for the disturbance elimination as well as the friction compensation.