Usually, the order of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is equal to the relative order of the plant. To improve the control performance, a robust reduced-order method for ADRC is investigated in this paper. Firstly, frequency domain analysis shows that the lower-order extended state observer (ESO) has a smaller disturbance estimation error, so disturbance attenuation capability can be improved by reducing the order of ADRC. However, using only reduced-order ADRC will worsen the robustness of closed-loop systems. Therefore, a robust ADRC method based on a modified noise reduction disturbance observer (MNRDOB) is proposed. The main role of the MNRDOB is to improve the control performance of the closed-loop system by modifying the structure of the controlled object. In addition, the robust stability of the closed-loop control system based on the MNRDOB is discussed. Moreover, some simulations are used to demonstrate the robustness and noise suppression effects of the compound control method reduced-order ADRC with MNRDOB, and the parameter tuning method for the MNRDOB to improve the robustness of the system is given. Finally, some experiments on speed control of a one-dimensional gimbal are performed, and the results show that the proposed method is excellent in overshoot, tracking accuracy, and disturbance attenuation.