The two topics at the heart of this thesis are how to improve control of industrial manipulators and how to reason about the role of models in automatic control.

On industrial manipulators, two case studies are presented. The first investigates estimation with inertial sensors, and the second compares control by feedback linearization to control based on gain-scheduling.

The contributions on the second topic illustrate the close connection between control and estimation in different ways. A conceptual model of control is introduced, which can be used to emphasize the role of models as well as the human aspect of control engineering. Some observations are made regarding block-diagram reformulations that illustrate the relation between models, control and inversion. Finally, a suggestion for how the internal model principle, internal model control, disturbance observers and Youla-Kucera parametrization can be introduced in a unified way is presented.