Recent advances in fractional order calculus led to the improvement of control theory and resulted in the potential use of a fractional adaptive proportional integral derivative (FAPID) controller in advanced academic and industrial applications as compared to the conventional adaptive PID (APID) controller. Basically, a fractional order adaptive PID controller is an improved version of a classical integer order adaptive PID controller that outperformed its classical counterpart. In the case of a closed loop system, a minor change would result in overall system instability. An efficient PID controller can be used to control the response of such a system. Among various parameters of an instable system, the speed of the system is an important parameter to be controlled efficiently. The current research work presents the speed control mechanism for an uncertain, instable system by using a fractional-order adaptive PID controller. To validate the arguments, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed fractional order adaptive PID controller have been studied in comparison to the classical adaptive PID controller using the criterion of quadratic error. Simulation findings and comparisons demonstrated that the proposed controller has superior control performance and outstanding robustness in terms of percentage overshoot, settling time, rising time, and disturbance rejection.