With the continuous development of digital technology, the mechanical arm has been widely used because of its flexibility and convenience. The dynamic equation of flexible manipulator is complex, and there are external disturbances and model uncertainties. A sliding mode control (SMC) method of robot based on adaptive fuzzy compensation is proposed. The controller design of nonlinear system adopts the method of combining sliding mode control with fuzzy approximation, and the fuzzy system is used to realize the adaptive approximation of the unknown part of the robot model. Matlab/Simulink simulation results show that the control system based on adaptive fuzzy compensation can be stable, effectively reduce the fuzzy gain and meet the expected dynamic performance index.