AbstractIn this paper, the influences of unknown disturbances are first analyzed, and the structural properties of the disturbances are given. By appropriately applying Fourier series approximation, a novel continuously differentiable nonlinear friction model is synthesized by modifying the traditional piecewise continuous LuGre model, then a desired compensation version of the proposed adaptive repetitive controller is developed for precise tracking control of servo systems to compensate for spatial periodic disturbance and random disturbance. To further reduce noise sensitivity and improve tracking accuracy, the desired compensation robust control term is also constructed to effectively attenuate the effect of approximation errors, and thus a theoretically asymptotic tracking performance is achieved by the proposed controller, which is very important for the high accuracy tracking control of servo systems. Extensive comparative experimental results are obtained to verify the high‐performance nature of the proposed control strategies.