The traditional chips used in motor control are FPGA, DSP, ARM and so on, which need to be programmed manually. These methods are complicated in both development and debugging process. For this situation, the hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform real-time unit (RTU) provides a very effective and rapid method to develop, optimize and test complex control algorithms without manual programming on real hardware. A model reference adaptive position sensorless control system for permanent magnet synchronous motor （PMSM） is developed based on RTU experimental platform. The control strategy is simulated and experimentally studied on the platform of MATLAB/Simulink and RTU. The results show that the control method is correct and the RTU platform is feasible and effective.