AbstractIn many machining processes cutting forces are of harmonic nature. The frequency content of these forces may extend far beyond the closed-loop bandwidth of the commonly used feed drive controllers. In ball screw drives, high–frequency disturbances may also originate from repetitive errors synchronized with the rotation of the ball screw. To improve the track following and disturbance rejection performance of the controller at selected frequencies, the use of Adaptive Feedforward Cancellation (AFC) method has been proposed in this paper. Tuning of AFC parameters for achieving a good performance and robustness is discussed, and experimental results from high-speed tracking and metal cutting tests are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in cancelling out the effect of harmonic disturbances.