Systems actuated trough a highly flexible shaft poses a big challenge to control strategies as the actuator is not connected directly to the end effector, causing propagation effects as well as an energy accumulation and dissipation in the shaft. This thesis focuses the study of one of the most investigated application of this type, the top driven drilling system used in the oil and gas industry. Usually, the drilling system is composed by a top drive linked to the drill bit trough hundreds or even thousands of meters of steel pipes. All kind of vibrations will be found: longitudinal deformations will be associated to the bit bouncing, flexional with rubbing, and torsional with stick-slip effects. A better understanding is only possible when each of these situations is carefully investigated. This thesis focuses on the torsional deformation of the highly flexible string and presents two different models for the drill string, the first is the most common single spring single damper model. The second one is a 20 DOF Lumped parameters that has the advantage of being able to consider the mass of the drill string and propagation of torsional waves in the shaft. The investigation includes the development of a test rig adequate for torsional vibrations under damping that may induce stick-slip in the system. Two control techniques are studied to reduce the torsional vibrations in drill strings with numerical and experimental results presented. The first is a behavior based open loop scheme control, which is very simple and effective to reduce stick-slip oscillations. The second one is the L1 adaptive control that uses a reference model on its structure.