This paper presents a new control algorithm for dynamic control of a unicycle robot. The unicycle robot motion consists of a pitch that is controlled by an in-wheel motor and a roll that is controlled by a reaction wheel pendulum. The unicycle robot doesn't have any actuator for a yaw axis control, which makes the derivation of the dynamics relatively simple. The Euler-Lagrange equation is applied to derive the dynamic equations of the unicycle robot to implement the dynamic speed control of the unicycle robot. To achieve the real time speed control of the unicycle robot, the sliding mode control and LQ regulator are utilized to guarantee the stability while maintaining the desired speed tracking performance. In the roll controller, the sigmoid-function based sliding mode controller has been adopted to minimize the chattering by the switching function. The LQR controller has been implemented for the pitch control to drive the unicycle robot to follow the desired velocity trajectory in real time using the state variables of pitch angle, angular velocity, angle and angular velocity of the wheel. The control performance of the two control systems form a single dynamic model has been demonstrated by the real experiments.