Continuous manufacturing of thin metal sheets, strips, and foils is essential across various industries including automotive, aerospace, electronics, and construction. Traditional sheet metal production methods, such as hot and cold rolling, involve energy-intensive processes characterized by high carbon emissions. Alternative technologies like electrodeposition are limited due to high costs and constraints related to alloy compositions and scalability. Metal peeling is a novel, clean-energy alternative that produces continuous metal strip and foil by the process of orthogonal machining under tension. Unlike conventional rolling, metal peeling converts bulk material to finished thin foils/strips in a single step. Further integration of peeling with roll-to-roll (R2R) transport and processing enables continuous, scalable production of coils at substantially reduced energy use, carbon emissions, and process complexity. Successful industrial-scale implementation of metal peeling depends on the ability to meet the stringent demands on strip thickness and surface quality. These attributes are highly sensitive to many parameters, including cutting conditions, feedstock properties, and strip transport behavior under applied tension. Consequently, achieving consistent strip quality necessitates precise real-time regulation of thickness, tension, and velocity during continuous production. Further, the peeled strip often undergoes subsequent finishing and exposure to heating/cooling before final coiling, creating a tightly coupled thermo-mechanical system that influences strip quality and tension dynamics. The central objective of this dissertation is to develop physics-based models and advanced real-time control strategies capable of systematically mitigating process and machine disturbances, and ensuring uniform and high-quality metal strips in continuous production. This dissertation addresses the modeling and control challenges associated with efficient peeling and transport of the peeled strip through four specific objectives: (1) development of a continuous R2R system for metal peeling, integrating advanced modules—accumulators for zero-speed splicing, automated splicers, tensioners, driven and idle rollers, finishing stations, coiling devices, and real-time sensors (e.g., load cells, velocimeter, thickness and diameter measurement)—to ensure efficient strip transport from peeling to final coiling while maintaining uniform strip geometry and quality; (2) formulation of a mathematical framework for strip transport in metal peeling by advancing first-principles modeling and enabling a control-oriented framework for real-time regulation of strip tension, velocity and thickness, while capturing strip deformation history, transport dynamics, and thickness variations influenced by peeling-transport interaction as well as process and machine disturbances; (3) implementation and validation of advanced cascaded and decentralized control strategies utilizing model-based feedforward control input and real-time feedback compensation, effectively managing both sudden disturbances and slow parameter drifts; and (4) analytical modeling of steady-state temperature distribution—when the peeled strip undergoes auxiliary heating or cooling processes, such as annealing, drying, and coating—by solving the two-dimensional advection–diffusion equation, guiding proactive thermal management strategies to minimize thermally induced defects and enhance strip quality. Overall, this dissertation contributes to sustainable R2R manufacturing of thin metal strip and foil. While the specific focus is on metal peeling, the developed methodologies and scientific principles are broadly applicable, supporting diverse industrial processes and continuous manufacturing applications, including coated foils, battery current collectors, and thin-film metal products.