An adaptive control and compensation scheme is proposed in this paper to solve the problem on torque ripples caused by the velocity fluctuation in a DC torque motor. Firstly, a mechanism for torque ripple is found out acoording to the analysis of DC motor’s structure. Then, the mathematical model is established and a robust adaptive control strategy is designed. The control algorithm is contained by two parts: one is a a lead-lag feedback controller for verifying the stability and the robustness of the system nominally;and the other is an adaptive compensator, which is used to compensate the torque ripple adaptively through a recursive least square identification. The experimental results show that the peak-peak value and the RMS value of velocity fluctuation obtained by the proposed method been reduced to 1.77% and 0.39% respectively as compared with two indexes of 4.21% and 0.97% obtained only by the lead-lag feedback controller. The conclusion is that proposed adaptive compensation method can depress the velocity fluctuation caused by motor torque ripple efficiently.