Dielectric electroactive polymer actuators are new important transducers in control system applications. The design of a high performance controller is a challenging task for these devices. In this work, a PI controller was studied for a dielectric electroactive polymer actuator. The pole placement problem for a closed-loop system with the PI controller was analyzed. The limitations of a PI controller in the pole placement problem are discussed. In this work, the analytic PI controller gain rules were obtained, and therefore extension to adaptive control is possible. To minimize the influence of unmodeled dynamics, the robust adaptive control law is applied. Furthermore, analysis of robust adaptive control was performed in a number of simulations and experiments.