The Department of Automatic Control at LTH was founded in 1965 by Karl Johan Åström. The unit rapidly established itself as a world leader in the areas of System Identification, Computer Aided Modeling, and Adaptive Control. Following Åström’s retirement in 1999, the department is still operating as a single tightly integrated unit, now under the leadership of Karl-Erik Årzén. It has expanded its reputation into many new and emerging research areas, including Large-Scale Systems and Learning, Autonomous Real-Time Systems, and Innovative Control Applications. Furthermore, the department maintains a commitment to excellence in teaching in all three cycles of higher education. So far, around 130 PhD theses and more than 1200 master's theses have been completed within the department.

We give basic and advanced-level courses in control and learning within the regular engineering program to students from different areas of engineering. Together with the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, in 2020 we launched an international master's program in Systems, Learning, and Control. We also have a PhD program with about 20–25 active students who specialize in various theories and applications of automatic control.

The department is hosting several large research projects funded by the European Commission and Swedish public and private funding agencies. There is also active collaboration with industry.

Applications of control There are many application areas of automatic control