A classical control approach to the design and analysis of proportional–integral (PI) speed controllers for electrical drives is presented. After vindicating the fact that traditional one-degree-of-freedom PI control generally gives unsatisfactory performance, a well-performing two-degree-of-freedom PI controller is designed, with analytical parameter selection. The robustness of the obtained closed-loop system is analyzed and is found to be satisfactory. All the proposed control designs are validated by means of experiments