The paper presents a new nonlinear predictive control design for a kind of nonlinear mechatronic drive systems, which leads to the improvement of regulatory capacity for both reference input tracking and load disturbance rejection. The nonlinear system is first treated into an equal linear time-variant system plus a nonlinear part using a neural network, then ail iterative learning linear predictive controller is developed with a similar structure of Pi optimal regulator and with setpoint feed forward control. Because the overall control law is a linear one, this design gives a direct and also effective multi-step prediction method and avoids the complicated nonlinear optimization. The control law is also ail accurate one compared with traditional linearized method. Besides, changes of the system state variables are considered in the objective function with control performance superior to conventional state space predictive control designs which only consider the predicted output errors. The proposed method is compared with conventional state space predictive control method and classical PI optimal control method. Tracking performance, robustness and disturbance rejection are enlightened. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.