New areas of application and the steady pressure of competition in the robotics industry demand continuous improvement of industrial robots in terms of speed and accuracy. The Institute of System Dynamics and Control contributes to this improvement by developing advanced model-based control methods. The goal is a significant improvement in the performance of the machines, purely based on new software algorithms. Many algorithms developed during the long-standing cooperation with our industry partner KUKA are today part of commercial KUKA robot controllers. The success of this technology transfer continues until today. Our research focuses on optimal trajectory planning, compensation of elastic effects by calculating the inverse dynamics, robust and adaptive control methods for position and force control as well as model-based disturbance compensation.