This thesis is mainly devoted to the investigation of speed control methods of three phase, cage rotor induction motors with particular emphasis being given to vector control and direct torque control techniques. Modern control strategies such as vector control and direct torque control are investigated as well as the conventional methods such as open loop (constant V/f) operation. A number of different pulse width modulation (p.w.m.) waveform generation strategies are simulated and discussed and their application to the above speed control systems fully investigated. A 3kW, three phase induction motor drive has been designed and experimental data obtained from it in order to verify the results achieved by simulation. It is shown that direct torque control achieves decoupling of the motor torque and the motor flux without the use of a co-ordinate transform. A variation of the direct torque control algorithm has also been developed and implemented. It is shown, that by using different switching tables for the selection of voltage vectors, the performance of direct torque control can be further improved. Further insight into the nature of direct torque control has been gained from the study of the effect of the application of inverter switch settings, or the application of corresponding voltage vectors, on the motor flux and torque. It has been found that the range of torque variation of the motor drive system depends strongly on both the motor load torque and the motor speed. The results of the work reported indicate that the range of torque variation for a drive system which strongly depends on motor load torque and motor speed is considerably reduced by the novel direct torque control system resulting from the research. The control algorithms have been implemented on 32 bit micro processors which facilitate the use of parallelism in both the hardware and the software design. The resulting system is capable of controlling a three phase induction motor with variable voltage and variable frequency with control strategies such as six step operation, symmetric and asymmetric regular and natural sampled p.w.m. waveforms, sigma delta modulation methods, space vector modulation techniques, flux vector control and direct torque control.