In recent years, inkjet technology has emerged as a promising manufacturing tool. This technology has gained its popularity mainly due to the facts that it can handle diverse materials and it is a non-contact and additive process. Moreover, the inkjet technology offers low operational costs, easy scalability, digital control and low material waste. Thus, apart from conventional document printing, the inkjet technology has been successfully applied as a micro-manufacturing tool in the areas of electronics, mechanical engineering, and life sciences. In this thesis, we investigate a piezo-based drop-on-demand (DoD) printhead which is commonly used for industrial and commercial applications due to its ability to handle diverse materials. A typical drop-on-demand (DoD) inkjet printhead consists of several ink channels in parallel. Each ink channel is provided with a piezo-actuator which on the application of an actuation voltage pulse, generates pressure oscillations inside the ink channel. These pressure oscillations push the ink drop out of the nozzle. The print quality delivered by an inkjet printhead depends on the properties of the jetted drop, i.e., the drop velocity, the drop volume and the jetting direction. To meet the challenging performance requirements posed by new applications, these drop properties have to be tightly controlled. The performance of the inkjet printhead is limited by two factors. The first one is the residual pressure oscillations. The actuation pulses are designed to provide an ink drop of a specified volume and velocity under the assumption that the ink channel is in a steady state. Once the ink drop is jetted the pressure oscillations inside the ink channel take several micro-seconds to decay. If the next ink drop is jetted before these residual pressure oscillations have decayed, the resulting drop properties will be different from the ones of the previous drop. The second limiting factor is the cross-talk. The drop properties through an ink channel are affected when the neighboring channels are actuated simultaneously. Generally, the drop consistency is improved by manual tuning of the piezo actuation pulse based on some physical insight or based on exhaustive experimental studies on the printhead. However, these ad-hoc procedures have proved to be insufficient in dealing with the above limitations. In this thesis, a model-based control approach is proposed to improve the performance of a DoD inkjet printhead. It offers a systematic and efficient means to improve the attainable performance of a DoD inkjet printhead by reducing the effect of the residual oscillations and the cross-talk. Furthermore, the models that have been developed for this purpose can also give new insights into the operation of the printhead. In order to achieve this goal, it is required to have a fairly accurate and simple model of an inkjet printhead. It is not easy to obtain a good physical model for an inkjet printhead due to insufficient knowledge of the complex interactions in the printhead. Therefore, in this thesis, we have used system identification, i.e. we use experimental measurements in order to develop a model. For this purpose, it is required that the piezo-actuator is also used as a sensor. Note that the crucial aspect in the model development is to obtain a model of the inkjet system close to its operating conditions. Therefore, we have collected measurements of the piezo sensor signal during the jetting of a series of drops at a given DoD frequency. For the printhead under investigation, we found that the dynamics of the ink channel are dependent on the DoD frequency. This phenomenon is caused by non-linearities in the droplet formation. Consequently, we have modeled the ink channel dynamics for every DoD frequency. In this thesis, it is shown that the set of local inkjet models obtained at different DoD frequencies can be encompassed by a polytopic uncertainty on the parameters of a nominal model. Using the same identification procedure, the cross-talk can also be modeled. In order to improve the printhead performance the actuation pulse was redesigned. The new drive pulse is designed to provide good performance for all models in the area of uncertainty by means of robust feedforward control. The pulse also respects the pulse shape constraints posed by driving electronics (ASICS). Besides the robust actuation pulse, our approach also introduces an optimal delay between actuation of neighboring channels to reduce the cross-talk. The current driving electronics limits the possibilities of reshaping the actuation pulse. Since it is expected that this limitation will be relaxed in the future, we have also developed procedure to design a robust pulse without pulse shape constraints. The performance improvement achieved with this unconstrained pulse has proved to be quite limited. The proposed method is also useful for inkjet practitioners who do not have any insight in the inkjet dynamics. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated by our experimental results. The proposed method was verified in practice by jetting a series of ink drops at various DoD frequencies and also by jetting a bitmap image. For the printhead under consideration, the drop-consistency is improved by almost four times with the proposed approach when compared to the conventional methods.