Design and Comparison of PSO, SA and GA tuned PID Controller for Ball Balancer Arrangement

This paper presents design and control of a 2D Ball Balancer Arrangement using PID controller tuned with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Genetic algorithm (GA). The paper also compares the results of proposed control techniques with Classical PID controller. The Ball Balancer Arrangement is a non-linear system with complex plant transfer function. Classical control method such as Classical PID is able to control the Ball Balancer Arrangement but performance is dependent on human expertise. PSO, SA and GA are heuristic algorithms which can find the best solution without the need of human experience. Heuristic algorithms improve the solution in every iteration based on cost function minimization. The comparative analysis of PSO, SA and GA tuned PID is shown in terms of delay time, rise time, and settling time. The designing and simulation have been successfully performed in MATLAB/ Simulink environment.