The main purpose of the present research is to control the rotational speed of the air motor to track the speed we need by using DSP(digital signal processor) technology. In order to track the signal accurately ,we first perform the system identification. However, the experiments show that system parameters vary under different experiment conditions. This result suggests that one should use adaptive control to cope with different experiment conditions. The experiments of model reference adaptive control show that the adaptive control can effectively improve the system performance without knowing the system parameters.