Abstract: During the operation of the target positioning turntable servo system, the problem of drive delay and response delay caused by backlash in transmission can seriously affect the stability of the tamable. In this paper, a novel backstepping terminal sliding mode control algorithm is proposed to deal with the problem of tracking control of servo system with backlash. Firstly, the state space of the target positioning turntable servo system is established, the dead zone function is introduced to describe the nonlinearity of the backlash, and the continuous differentiable function is designed to fit the dead zone function. Secondly, by utilizing the backstepping control method and terminal sliding mode control method, the virtual controller and actual controller are designed for the servo system. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system is proved by Lyapunov theory. Finally, the simulation system and experimental platform are performed. Compared with the result of conventional PID controller, the effectiveness and superiority of the control method proposed in this paper are verified.