In this paper, a direct formula is proposed for design of robust PID controller for sun tracker system using quadratic regulator approach with compensating pole (QRAWCP). The main advantage of the proposed approach is that, there is no need to use recently developed iterative soft computing techniques which are time consuming, computationally inefficient and also there is need to know boundary of search space. In order to show the superiority of the proposed approach, performance of the sun tracker system is compared with the recently applied tuning approaches for sun tracker systems such as particle swarm optimization, firefly algorithm and cuckoo search algorithm. The performance of the existing and proposed approaches are verified in time domain, frequency domain and also using integral performances indices. It is found that the performance is improved in transient, robustness, and uncertainty aspects in comparison to recently proposed soft computing approaches.