The sliding mode controller of mobile welding robot is established in this paper through applying the method of variable structure control with sliding mode into the control of the mobile welding robot.The traditional switching function smooth method is improved by combining the smoothed switching function with the time-varying control gain.It is shown that the proposed sliding mode controller is robust to bounded external disturbances.Experimental results demonstrate that sliding mode controller algorithm can be used into seam tracking and the tracking system is stable with bounded uncertain disturbance.In the seam tracking process, the robot moves steadily without any obvious chattering.