Two promising control candidates have been selected to test the sinusoidal reference tracking performance for a brush-type polishing machine having strong nonlinearities and disturbances. The controlled target system is an oscillating mechanism consisting of a common positioning stage of one degree-of-freedom with a screw and a ball nut driven by a servo motor those can be obtained commercially. Beside the strong nonlinearity such as stick-slip friction, the periodic contact of the polishing brush and the work piece adds an external disturbance. Selected control candidates are a Sliding Mode Control (SMC) and a variant of a feedback linearization control called Smooth Robust Nonlinear Control (SRNC). A SMC and SRNC are selected since they have good theoretical backgrounds, are suitable to be implemented in a digital environment and show good disturbance and modeling uncertainty rejection performance. It should be also noted that SRNC has a nobel approach in that it uses the position information to compensate the stickslip friction. For both controllers analytical and experimental studies have been conducted to show control design approaches and to compare the performance against the strong nonlinearity and the disturbances.