The simulation turntable is a critical piece of simulation equipment in the aerospace and industrial sectors.In order to improve the robustness of the simulation turntable control system a-gainst changes in the load moment of inertia,as well as variations in the mathematical model pa-rameters and external disturbances,the adaptive theory is used in the servo control system of the simulation turntable.The control law is designed by using variable structure sliding mode control,and a composite controller based on modern control is developed by incorporating a full sliding mode factor.The simulation experimental environment is established by using Simulink and Matlab platforms to compare the simulation results before and after the load change under a unit sinusoidal signal of 20 Hz.The response amplitude error of the PID control system increases by 3.6%,while that of the adaptive control system increases by only 1.3%,demonstrating the effec-tiveness of adaptive control in reducing system error.When a step signal is input,the steady-state error is reduced from 3.2%to 0.3%by the adaptive control system.Finally,a real experiment is performed on the simulation turntable.Under the sinusoidal signal with an amplitude of 0.1° and a frequency of 20 Hz,after adding load and disturbance,the response amplitude error of the PID control system increases by 6.6%,while the amplitude error of the adaptive control system increa-ses by only 2.4%.This indicates that the change in error of the adaptive control system is less than that of the PID control system.The experimental results show that the adaptive controller outperforms the PID controller in terms of control effectiveness.The designed adaptive controller improves the robustness of the control system against load changes and disturbances.