Enhancing stability and position control of a constrained magnetic levitation system through optimal fractional-order PID controller

Magnetic levitation systems are complex and nonlinear, requiring sophisticated control methods to maintain the stability and position of the levitated object. This research presents an optimized fractional order PID (FOPID) control approach for position control of a freely-suspended ferromagnetic object. The dynamic system model is mathematically modeled in MATLAB using first-principle modeling and the grey box method. The FOPID controller has five degrees of freedom (DOFs) that allow for fine-tuning of the control gains and fractional orders, enabling the system to handle the nonlinearity inherent in the magnetic levitation system. The DOFs of FOPID and integer order PID controllers are optimized using the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm and results are compared with state-of-the-art optimization methods. The results showed that the FOPID controller can effectively control the magnetic levitation system with constraints and outperforms other methods by up to 92.14% in terms of settling time with negligible steady-state error.