The objectives of this survey are to summarize and to evaluate the present state of knowledge concerning control algorithms for industrial robots (IR). In the past 15 years, there has been a confluence of research in this field and excellent results of general interest have been produced. However, the wide practical application of the results is rather poor. The applicability of advanced control algorithms is demonstrated by two practical case studies carried through at the Fraunhofer-Institute for Information and Data Processing (IITB).