In many real-life applications, vibrations are disturbances that need to be rejected. It is the case in, e.g., many precision industrial processes which cannot take place because of vibrations. Active vibration control is the engineering domain consisting in suppressing the vibrations by the mean of active application of a force (actuator) in an equal and opposite fashion to the forces causing vibrations.

In order to perform this control in an efficient way, one needs to measure the vibrations (sensors). Using the instrumentation sensors-actuators, one can design a controller in order to reduce the vibrations. It is the domain of smart structures.