Optimal Control of DC Motors Using PSO Algorithm for Tuning PID Controller

The DC motors are widely used in the mechanisms that require control of speed. Different speed can be obtained by changing the field voltage and the armature voltage. The classic PID controllers are widely used in industrial process for speed control. But they aren’t suitable for high performance cases, because of the low robustness of PID controller. So many researchers have been studying various new control techniques in order to improve the system performance and tuning PID controllers. This paper presents particle swarm optimization (PSO) method for determining the optimal PID controller parameters to find the optimal parameters of DC Motor speed control system. The DC Motor system drive is modeled in MATLAB/SIMULINK and PSO algorithm is implemented using MATLAB toolbox. The results obtained through simulation show that the proposed controller can perform an efficient search for the optimal PID controller. Simulation results show performance improvement in time domain specifications for a step response (no overshoot, minimal rise time, steady state error = 0)