Abstract: Time-delay estimation technique is adopted to set up a dynamic model for a novel series-parallel vehicle electrophoretic coating conveyer, which can fully reflect its dynamic characteristics and fulfill real-time control. Then, for solving the problems of system uncertainty and time-delay estimation error, sliding mode control strategy is introduced, and for improving the tracking performance of system and effectively weakening the chattering caused by sliding mode control, an adaptive rule is introduced, which can adjust the magnitude of sliding mode switching gain and change its adjusting rate, and hence a time-delay estimation-based adaptive sliding mode control without upper-bound information of uncertain system is proposed, with its stability validated by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally a contrastive simulation on the adaptive sliding mode control with time-delay estimation and that without changing the adjusting rate of sliding mode switching gain is conducted by MATLAB and verified by test on prototype. The results show that the proposed adaptive sliding mode control with time-delay estimation achieve better tracking performance without upper-bound information of uncertain system, and effectively weaken the sliding mode control-induced chattering.