Industrial robots are used in a variety of industry branches, especially where precision is needed. This paper deals with modeling and control of a positioning process for an industrial robot part of the hot rolling chain, that must extract with accuracy heated billets from a rotary hearth furnace. The model is a discrete one, obtained from a continuous form, by using some digitizing methods and different values of sampling time. The authors used Zero-order hold method, simple and Tustin substitutions. The best fitted model is obtained by comparing root means square deviation for each resulted discrete model. The proposed control is a discrete PI control law, implemented and validated using computer simulation software. The parameters result quite easily from closed loop Ziegler Nichols method, but require further tuning to improve transient response performances.