• The development and state of the art, at a national and international level, of the problems involved in the design and implementation of automated systems to control and supervise processes in real time.
• The interests and experiences of the faculty.
• The role played by DEPFI in the University, which involves doing top-level research and development, in order to solve national interest problems and to train specialists in these areas.

Research areas of the Control Group

• Robotics. The robotics area is focused on the design and construction of control systems for mechanical manipulators that execute general tasks. In specific the problems of modelling and control of manipulators are studied at DEPFI.
• Distributed control. The aim of this area is the design of control systems with a structure that delegate the control effort to slave units. This line of research cover two aspects, the theory and the applications. From the theoretical point of view the distributed control is focused in solving coupling problems, the reduction of models and to improved the techniques employed in the distribution of tasks. In the application aspect it's studied the real time regulation and control of physical processes, and the implantation of the control with digital devices.
• Industrial Process Control. This area studies and proposes solutions for implementing control schemes on industrial processes. It applies techniques like robust and adaptive control on pilot processes like sections of water channels for irrigation, a water treatment plant, etc.
• Monitoring and failure detection. The aim of the fault detection area is to solve the supervision and monitoring of a process plant through estimation and prediction techniques. A type-like oil gas pipeline is used to prove this technique.

• Non-linear systems. This line of research studies: adaptive control, sliding modes techniques applied to induction motors, robotics, and power quality problems.
• Adaptive control. At DEPFI it's studied the stability and performance of adaptive controllers with new schemes applied to an industrial process.
• Identification. The aim of this area is to study the problems and experimental techniques to obtain mathematical models of dynamic systems. In particular at DEPFI, there is a search for new identification schemes.
• Robust control. This area searches control schemes that preserve predefine properties in spite of perturbations, uncertainties, and unmodel dynamics. There is work focused on oscillatory, earthquake systems.
• Optimal control. This line of research seeks to solve problems in the minimization and maximization of a criterion with or without constrains. From a theoretical point of view, there is research in the application of dynamic programming in learning algorithms in biological and artificial neural networks.