In this paper, an adaptive control problem of a hydraulic actuator for vehicle active suspension controller is divided into two parts: the inner loop controller and the outer loop controller. Inner loop controller, which is a nonlinear adaptive controller, is designed to control the force generated by the nonlinear hydraulic actuator acting under the effects of Coulomb friction. For simplicity of designing a nonlinear controller, the spool valve dynamics of a hydraulic actuator is reduced using a singular perturbation technique. The estimation error signal used to an indirect parameter adaptation is calculated without a regressor filtering. The absolute velocity of a sprung mass will be damped down by its negatively proportional term(sky-hook damper) adopted as an outer loop controller. Simulation results are presented to show the importance of controlling the actuator force and the validity of the proposed adaptive controller. (author). refs., figs. tab.