The electro-hydraulic shaking table is investigated, in the present paper, to simulate the vibrational working environment of industrial components and equipment. Adaptive robust control can be applied to the shaking table system because electro-hydraulic systems suffer from internal parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. However, the adaptive robust controller design is complicated and has a large computational cost owing to the ‘explosion of terms’ problem. Thus dynamic surface control is applied in the design procedure of adaptive robust controllers to overcome the ‘explosion of terms’ problem. In this work, dynamic surface adaptive robust control is proposed. It simplifies the designed procedure of the controller and decreases its computational cost. Firstly, the structure of a shaking table is formulated and the operation principles of the shaking table, including the hydraulic and control principles, are analysed. A change is made in the mechanical-hydraulic system of the fluid circuit to address the problem of changing the vibration direction. Secondly, a dynamic model of a shaking table is proposed. Based on analysis of this model, the design of a dynamic surface adaptive robust controller for a shaking table is presented so as to improve its performance. Finally, comparative simulations and experiments are carried out. The comparison of performance results with proportional-integral-derivative control verify the correctness of the hydraulic scheme and control principle, as well as the high-performance of the dynamic surface adaptive robust controller. The shaking table achieves a guaranteed dynamical performance and tracking accuracy for the output in the presence of parameter and load uncertainties.