Abstract: To deal with the loading difficulty of traditional shaking table substructure test, a substructure shaking table test method loading with AMD (active mass driver) device was studied in the paper. A shear-type frame structure that may damage at lower floors was chosen as a test subject. A so-called closed-loop multi-variable control algorithm was utilized to improve the control performance of the AMD loading system. The feasibility, test performance and design principles and methods were analyzed and discussed through theoretical study, numerical simulations and a comparison with PID displacement control. Results show that the proposed shaking table substructure test method can improve the accuracy of control significantly.