Abstract: This paper presents a method to model and design servo controllers for flexible ball screw drives with dynamic variations. A mathematical model describing the structural flexibility of the ball screw drive containing time-varying uncertainties and disturbances with unknown bounds is proposed. A mode-compensating adaptive backstepping sliding mode controller is designed to suppress the vibration. The time-varying uncertainties and disturbances represented in finite-term Fourier series can be estimated by updating the Fourier coefficients through function approximation technique. Adaptive laws are obtained from Lyapunov approach to guarantee the convergence and stability of the closed loop system. The simulation results indicate that the tracking accuracy is improved considerably with the proposed scheme when the time-varying parametric uncertainties and disturbances exist.