This paper presents a hydraulic actuator and tendon drive system that was specifically designed for a lower-limb exoskeleton to provide high power and low inertia. The dynamics of the actuator-tendon system were analyzed based on the exoskeleton system and an adaptive sliding-mode trajectory tracking controller was designed for the drive system. The stability proof indicates that the controller is globally stable. The experimental results demonstrated that the controller provides high tracking accuracy and is robust to external disturbances and unmodeled nonlinearities. Moreover, the controller has less errors than the conventional PID controller. Further tests that included the joints of the exoskeleton were conducted to verify the performance of the controller.