The purpose of this paper is to address the synthesis and experimental application of a generalized predictive control (GPC) technique on an Orthoglide robot.Design/methodology/approach– The control strategy is composed of two control loops. The inner loop aims at linearizing the nonlinear robot dynamics using feedback linearization. The outer loop tracks the desired trajectory based on GPC strategy, which is robustified against measurement noise and neglected dynamics using Youla parameterization.Findings– The experimental results show the benefits of the robustified predictive control strategy on the dynamical performance of the Orthoglide robot in terms of tracking accuracy, disturbance rejection, attenuation of noise acting on the control signal and parameter variation without increasing the computational complexity.Originality/value– The paper shows the implementation of the robustified predictive control strategy in real time with low computational complexity on the Orthoglide robot.