Backlash in the actuator is one of the most important nonlinearities that limit the performance of speed and position control of mechanical systems. In this paper, we propose disturbance observers in order to estimate the effect of nonlinearities and cancel them subsequently. As a result the disturbance observers make the nonlinear system behave linearly. And finally we show that the disturbance observers guarantee the system robustness and the performance to reject the effect of backlash in the face of parameter uncertainties.