Dual-cylinder driving columns of a hydraulic support are required to be synchronous, with the purpose of guaranteeing the support balance and providing the roof an enough force. In addition, pipelines connecting cylinders with electro-hydraulic servo-valve have a significance influence on synchronization. Taking the length of pipelines into account, the mathematical model of a dual-cylinder driven hydraulic support is built, and the displacement–force coupling characteristic caused by the shared pump is tackled by a decoupling compensator. Following that, an adaptive sliding-mode synchro-position control strategy (ASSC) is designed based on an improved sliding mode reaching law and an adaptive law is developed to restrain the uncertainties resulted from the sub-system after decoupling. The experimental results obtained from the joint simulation platform and practical system show that the proposed controller can effectively reduce the synchronization error between two column positions and has better control performance than the PI and fuzzy PID controllers.
