The DC motors used in robotics and other industrial applications are submitted to frequent environment changes. As a consequence the motor model has time-varying parameters resulting in a poor performance when nonadaptive linear controllers are used. In this paper, two adaptive schemes for the position control of DC servomotors have been studied. The first scheme is based on self-tuning technique which uses pole-assignment by linear state feedback as the control strategy The second scheme uses adaptive feedforward in addition to pole-assigning linear state feedback. Experimental results show that a simple self-tuning control scheme for DC servomotors is a better solution to low cost automation problems in robotics and other industrial applications. The results obtained show that the adaptive scheme proposed by Kelly seems to offer no great benefit, rather it seems to increase the amount of overshoot. Standard schemes such as self-tuning control provide cost-effective solution to the control problem. The paper is organized as follows: a DC motor model and linear state feedback controller are discussed in Section II. Section III deals with self-tuning regulator, whereas adaptive feed-forward with linear state feedback is dealt with in Section IV. Experimental results on the DC motor control are given in Section V and some conclusions are drawn in Section VI.