The transverse vibrations of ropes of a high speed elevator are caused by a resonance with sway of building which is subjected to an earthquake or big wind, hence, an effective solution is demanded. In this research, it is performed to suppress the vibration of elevator rope by using a control device which is located near the upper boundary of rope. The control device has gaps between an actuator and the rope because of preventing abrasions of rope. Furthermore, the nonstationary sliding mode control is effective for the control of a time varying system such as elevator ropes and crane wires and robust for the nonlinearity of a control device. Therefore, this paper presents the vibration control for the elevator rope based on the nonstationary sliding mode control method by using control device with the gaps. The control effectiveness in the case of input saturation, stroke limitation or gap expansion and the robustness of the proposed method in the case of parameter variation and model errors are demonstrated by the numerical calculation. Consequently, the numerical results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is remarkable.
