A nonsmooth controller design procedure for the regulation of a class of m-DOF mechanical manipulators with viscous and Coulomb friction is presented. Based on an invariance principle developed elsewhere, a discontinuous controller that uses only position measurement feedback is proposed. It is proved that the origin of the closed-loop system is globally and asymptotically stable. A discontinuous observer is also proposed to estimate the velocity and improve the performance of the controlled system. This kind of nonsmooth observer is important to achieve the global asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. It is shown that the combination controller-observer can tolerate uncertainty in the friction coefficients if a bound on these parameters is known.