In this paper a design procedure and experimental implementation of a PID controller is presented. The PID controller is tuned according to damping optimum in order to achieve precise position control of a pneumatic servo drive. It is extended by a friction compensation and stabilization algorithm in order to deal with friction effects. In a case of supply pressure variations, more robust control system is needed. It is implemented by extending the proposed PID controller with friction compensator with the gain scheduling algorithm, which is provided by means of fuzzy logic. The effectiveness of proposed control algorithms is experimentally verified on an industrial cylindrical rodless actuator controlled by a proportional valve.