To replace cutterhead worn tools conveniently or get rid of shield’〖KG-*3〗s jamming effectively in complicated stratum, a slurry shield cutterhead telescopic system based on adaptive sliding mode control was designed. The cutterhead system included several same telescopic cylinders, and a mathematical model of telescopic cylinder system was developed. A nonlinear controller was designed combining sliding mode control and adaptive robust control. The stability of closed-loop system was verified via Lyapunov theory. Validity of the proposed strategy was proved by using AMESim and Simulink co-simulation. The results show that the designed cutterhead telescopic system not only has excellent position tracking accuracy, but also has great adaptability.