An advanced control strategy of shunt active filters (SAF) aiming to compensate for harmonic current in the electric supply grid is proposed. The SAF considered here is suitable for three-phase three-wire current harmonic compensation and is based on AC/DC three-phase boost converter topology. Robust control of the active-reactive current/power delivered by the SAF is designed exploiting the internal model principle. The stabilization of the DC-link voltage dynamics is addressed along with the fulfillment of the harmonics compensation objective. The two-time scale behavior of the SAF is exploited to apply the averaging theory in the control design. Experiments are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.