In present day tokamaks, the role of the control research is to support the physics experiments and to prepare technologies for future devices such as ITER and DEMO. This paper presents the developments done under the MST1 program collaboration on ASDEX Upgrade in the area of the actuator management, plasma density reconstruction, and feedback control of the electron temperature. In the area of actuator management, the actuator interface was unified for the neutral beams and for the gyrotrons, which enables to freely group these actuators to bigger objects, so called virtual actuators. In the area of plasma state reconstruction, a significant progress was made in the real time estimation of the plasma density in discharges with ion cyclotron heating. This enabled execution of experiments requiring electron temperature control in discharges with ion cyclotron heating, which are reported as well. Other control applications such as fusion power emulation using heating actuators are not described in detail, but a list of relevant references is given.