Optimal Tuning of PI^λD^μ Controller for PMDC Motor Speed Control Using Ant Colony optimization Algorithm for Enhancing Robustness of WFSs

Abstract

This article introduces a robust optimal control strategy to improve the speed error-tracking and control capability of a permanent magnet DC Motor (PMDC) driven wire-feeder systems (WFSs) of gas metal arc welding (GMAW) process. The proposed speed controller employs an optimized fractional-order-proportional + integral + derivative (FOPID) regulator that serves to eliminate oscillations, overshoots, undershoots and steady state fluctuations of the PMDC motor and makes the wire-feeder unit (WFU) has fast and stable starting process as well as excellent dynamic characteristics. The fixed controller parameters are meta-heuristically selected via an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Numerical simulations are performed in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and the performance of the proposed ACO-FOPID regulator is confirmed. The simulation results visibly present the considerable improvement rendered by the considered approach in the wire-feeder system's reference tracking performance, torque disturbance rejection capability, and transient recovery time.