This paper develops a high performance nonlinear control method for an electric load simulator (ELS). The tracking performance of the ELS is mainly affected by the actuator's active motion disturbance and friction nonlinearity. First, a nonlinear model of ELS is developed, and then the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model is used to represent the friction nonlinearity ofthe ELS. A state observer is constructed to estimate the speed of the load system. For converting the tracking control into a stabilization problem, a new control design called virtual desired state synthesis is proposed to define the internal desired states. External disturbances are attenuated based on an H ∞ criterion and the stability of the entire closed-loop model is investigated using the well-known quadratic Lyapunov function. Meanwhile, the feedback gains and the observer gains are obtained separately by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Both a simulation and experiment were performed to validate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm. KEYWORDS T-S fuzzy modelH ∞ criterionelectric load simulator (ELS), linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), torque tracking control