Abstract: We studied the fault-tolerant control problem of actuator faults for a class of nonlinear systems with model uncertainties and external disturbances, where in the control inputs were described by nonlinear functions subject to actuator dead zone and saturation. For problems where in the actuator faults and the times of their occurrence were unknown, we designed a tracking control method based on an adaptive sliding mode variable structure technique and a fault-tolerant control algorithm based on fault compensation to guarantee the stability of the faulty systems. An example is demonstrated to verify the effectiveness of the method.