Intelligent Search of Values for a Controller Using the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm to Control the Velocity of Displacement of a Robot

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors discuss a good application of the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm.

What is difference in contribution between your work and the following papers?

(PDF) An ABC-Optimized Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Controller for Navigation of Multiple Mobile Robots (researchgate.net)

How did you select the best fitness from each bee? Illustrate more about this step.

Authors must proof read the manuscript.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, thank you for reviewing the manuscript, your comments and suggestions are important to improve the quality of this work

Reviewer 2 Report

[See attachment]

The author had proposed an application of the ABC algorithm to control the displacement of a robot. While the proposed approach had undergone a proper scientific methodology, some other issues were found in the manuscript's current content and contribution, which require careful revision by the authors.

The followings are the issues found in the current version of the manuscript:

1. The abstract was missing the highlights of your results. Some overview would be good in making the contribution of the manuscript clear.
2. The last sentence of the Introduction (Section 1) needs more explanations on your motivation and research objective. What is your study trying to achieve? Why does controller important in the context of this study? Also, why the proportional-integral controller is used? Why not others (i.e., fuzzy logic controller)? Why do values, which I assume are of the controller, need to be adjusted? And why it had to be done during execution time? And of all the meta-heuristic approaches available, why does artificial bee colony is chosen? What makes ABC unique compared to others (ant colony, firefly, genetic algorithm, etc.)?
3. In addition, Related Work (Section 2) also mentioned that the original version of the ABC algorithm proposed by [8] was used. Why the original? Also, why said this first in the literature review while mentioning other methods later, which have less to no consequence to the study. The author needs to consider paraphrasing in Section 2 in such a way that showed why such related works came to be and "related" to yours in a sense that chronologically brought a breakthrough in scientific knowledge. Not just mentioning related jobs and what they do only, without synthesizing the content and understanding. Also, Section 2.1 and Section 2.2 need to be integrated into the main text of Section 2 since it is too short (1 paragraph). If not, more content and reference are necessary for it to deserve its subsection. Also, more description and citation are needed to support the information on closed-loop and open-loop systems. Is it related to the controller? Why need to mention here? Does it impact the performance or relevant in the context of your study?
4. The author did not provide more details on the software and hardware environment (only Matlab?). What about the onboard chips of the EV3 Lego kit robot? What makes this Lego kit was used for the experiment? Also, the fitness value of a meta-heuristic typically involves determining the optimal payoff of the search space. As such, why is just RMSE used for fitness? Why not consider the T_i and K_p parameters as part of the fitness objective formulation?
5. While Figure 2 describes in detail the ABC algorithm, it doesn't depict the experimental process, which is not clear how the Simulink block diagram and Lego Ev3 robot are related in the flowchart. Consider maybe a package and/or use-case diagram, which makes more sense in describing the application of the algorithm to the Lego robot. Also, why are Figure 2 and Figure 3 different? It should be combined if there is no significant difference and descriptions on the figure. For example, there were mentions about the many methods on the PI variable; what methods refer to? Be specific. Also, related to Figure 4, there were mentions about the response to obtain input experimentally. However, no experiment design was mentioned or to describe them. Where exactly will the unit step input and response were to be involved in the whole process? Why were there variants such as delay time L and S-shape meant? Any citation to support? Why is it essential concerning the study's context?
6. There were mentions of the Ziegler and Nichols method, which is not adequately described. Why is this method important? How can such a method were not discussed in Section 2? How is this method relevant for your study? Such information should be adequately described. In addition, what tuning rules are you referring to? Ziegler and Nichol's? Also, how such a method was used? How can such a method contain an infinity value (Table 1)?
7. Figure 6 provided a block program schematic for Pi control implementation. What does such a program implement? Why such info (i.e., Pi control) were not given or mentioned in Section 3? What does the figure intend to deliver? For example, what are the input and output? Why is the figure needed here? To emphasize on what? The figure should be self-contained and self-explanatory from its caption, independent from the text. If not, such a figure would not be beneficial to be included in the manuscript.
8. Figures 7, 8, 9, and 10 do not have sufficient quality to be interpreted or analysed further. Also, the legends of the figure are too small, and I was unable to discern what it represents. In addition, caption, again, we're not adequately described the content of the figure, and even the main text does not help in understanding, which is frustrating to comprehend the results or findings of the study. Also, was the error obtained (i.e., 16.6874) good or bad? Does it need to be high or low? Finally, the result observation was not given/described sufficiently.
9. Section 4 starts with the parameters used for the 15 test experiments, described in Section 3. Also, what results in Table 2 mean? Why was there a bolded value? Also, what do T_i and K_p refer to? What BEST means here (best of what)? Also, should the value be high or low? This information should be appropriately provided on the table caption or table footnote. Also, at a glance, besides the figure's poor quality, are there any differences or similarities between the three figures (Figure 8, 9, 10). Also, why do the results in Table 3 only compare with only reference [31]? Why was no comparison conducted on references [20—25]? Why error difference significant, while the T_i and K_p were not significantly different?
10. The discussion was not sufficient. What are the implications of your findings? Will the different environments of the robot (terrain different, obstacles, etc.) affect the error rate? How can it be "dynamic" realistically? Since there is no change of situations or variables across the experiments being conducted. Isn't it just optimization? Such "dynamic" mentions were never considered or studied before, which makes no sense to claim as a contribution in this manuscript suddenly.
11. Finally, what is the limitation or drawbacks of the study? What are the potential future works?

Other minor issues include the writing and English of the manuscript needed to be appropriately checked and rephrased and possibly conducted extensive English proofreading. For example, some sentences were too long, not correctly full stopped, unnecessary comma or comma at the wrong places, and wrongly referred figures and tables, which requires careful inspections and meticulous examination of the text. Also, the discussion Section might be better if located before the conclusion, making the reading quire weird and challenging to comprehend. All in all, the manuscript needs a lot of works before it is ready for publication. Nevertheless, the manuscript has good merit for a scientific contribution which encouraged to be published.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, thank you for reviewing the manuscript, your comments and suggestions are important to improve the quality of this work, a file with corrections and improvements to this work is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

In relation to the given review notes, items 10 and 11 were not sufficiently addressed, which is not a deal-breaker. Although the revision had addressed the major concerns raised regarding the manuscript, the significance of the work was missing, which may influence the way readers felt regarding the author's work. Nevertheless, English had significantly improved, while the revised version of the manuscript would be better if the author include a 'clean' version to better read the manuscript in its present form. I would recommend acceptance after minor editing, in regards to items 10 and 11 of the previous revision.

Author Response

Your comments are very important to improve the quality of this manuscript.

Thank you

Author Response File: Author Response.docx