We propose a scheme for nonlinear plants with time-varying control gain and time-varying plant coefficients, on the basis of a plant model consisting of a Brunovsky-type model with polynomials as approximators. We develop an adaptive robust control scheme for this plant, under the following assumptions: (i) the plant terms involve time-varying but bounded coefficients, being its upper bound unknown; (ii) the control gain is unknown, not necessarily bounded, and only its signum is known. To achieve robustness, we use a combination of robustifying control inputs and dead zone-type update laws. We apply this methodology to the speed control of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), and we achieve proper tracking results.