Motivated by the challenge of automatic steel converter relining, a brick laying robot has been designed and realized as a part of a brick laying system. Because the hydraulic actuators of this BLR show nonlinear dynamical properties which cannot be neglected in the ‘overall behavior, attention is paid to the problem of control design for hydraulically driven mechanical systems. Model based linear control design techniques have been used such that Ihe tight position tracking performance specifications have been accomplished. The required full model knowledge and the inflexibility with respect to on the spot controller adjustment are drawbacks of these methods. A solution is given by the introduction of the cascade Ap inner-loop for hydraulic actuators. ‘The cascade Ap controller is simple to design, requires a minimal amount of model knowledge, delivers a high performance, and is robust with respect to parameter variations. In addition, limiting effects on the controlled performance due to neglected parasitic dynamics are clearly understood. With this cascade Ap inner-loop, a hydraulic actuator can be controlled such that it can be regarded as a torque generator within a certain frequency band. Due to the cascade Ap inner-loop, known control methods from the robotic community can be used to contribute to the enlargement of the task suitability of the BLR. A plain version of impedance control is chosen as an outer-loop, to show the possibility of flexible (task specific) controller adjustment and to show how a functional integration of the task execution can be achieved.