The Chair of Control Engineering ("Lehrkanzel für Regelungstechnik") was established in 1973 with the appointment of Gerhard Schneider as Professor of Control Engineering and was assigned to the Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. When this faculty was split into the Faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, the Chair was assigned to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering as the Institute of Control Engineering in 1975.

After Gerhard Schneider's retirement in 1993, Nicolaos Dourdoumas was appointed as his successor as Professor of Control Engineering in 1994. In 2000, the institute's facilities were relocated from Krenngasse 37 to the newly constructed building at Inffeldgasse 16c. In order to reflect the institute's teaching and research portfolio, it was renamed the Institute for Automation and Control in 2004. Due to the restructuring of the faculties of electrical engineering and computer science, the institute had to move to Kopernikusgasse 24 in 2007. Following the retirement of Nicolaos Dourdoumas in 2013, Martin Horn was appointed professor of automation and control in 2014. With the institute's move to Inffeldgasse 21b, its current location, all institutes of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Engineering were united on the Inffeldgasse campus for the first time in 2015.

From 2017 to 2022, Daniel Watzenig joined the institute's team as a part-time endowed professor for automated driving. Since 2024, he has been working at the Institute for Visual Computing in the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering. Markus Reichhartinger was appointed professor of system theory and control engineering at the institute in 2023. At the time of writing, the globally funded scientific staff at the institute comprises two professors, one associate professor, and four university assistants. On a third-party funding basis, one project senior scientist with a permanent contract and twelve project assistants are employed. Three administrative staff members support the organizational activities at the institute.