This paper presents the speed control for a motor-generator system using an internal model control based controller. Initially, the internal model control technique is presented, which is compared with a pole placement based PID controller. Then, a linear model of the motor-generator system is identified employing the captured data from a data acquisition card and the matlab identification toolbox. Subsequently, the internal model control based controller and the pole placement PID controller are designed based on the identified linear model. Controllers implementation are performed using Matlab Stateflow toolbox in conjunction with a data acquisition card. The performance of the controllers is evaluated in presence of external disturbances for tracking tasks and is quantified through performance indices. Results show that employing the internal model control based controller, the motor-generator system has a better performance for tracking tasks than the pole placement PID controller.