This paper presents the design of a smooth starter for a DC motor that employs a fullbridge Buck inverter powered by renewable energy. In order to achieve this, a power supply from renewable energy is considered in the mathematical model associated with the "full-bridge Buck inverter-DC motor" system. Whereas, for the design of the smooth starter, the control based on sliding-mode and proportionalintegral control is proposed. The performance of the developed control is experimentally validated using the system prototype, the renewable energy emulator source TDK-Lambda G100-17, the DS1104 board, and the Matlab-Simulink software. Two types of experimental tests are presented when the system power supply is considered by: i) a time-varying input voltage and ii) the emulation of its behavior by a commercial photovoltaic panel. The experimental obtained results show the robustness of the controller proposed here to abrupt disturbances in its system parameters and torque.INDEX TERMS Full-bridge Buck inverter, DC motor, sliding mode control, PI control, robust control, Lyapunov stability, photovoltaic panel, renewable energy.