This paper examines the side brush control technologies for a novelty semi-autonomous road sweeper design. This study proposes a side brush structure and offers a brush control solution to improve working efficiency and reduce abrasive brush. For the mechanical system using a parallelogram mechanism, the direction of movement when raising and lowering the brush is always parallel to the road surface. The modeling of the side brush mechanism shows that this is a nonlinear system. Therefore, the Sliding Mode Control(SMC) was proposed and established from the dynamics equation. The Lyapunov theorem demonstrates its stability. Besides, we also consider the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to evaluate the responsiveness of the linear controller for a nonlinear system. Finally, the parameters of the controllers are optimized by a genetic algorithm to consider the response of the sliding mode control compared to the PID controller to control the road sweeper side brush with different references.