Universal Motors (UM) are normally used for driving portable apparatus such as hand tool machines, vacuum cleaners and most domestic apparatus.  The importance of UM is due to its own advantages such as high starting torque, very powerful in relation to its small size, having a variable speed; and lower cost. So, this paper focus on UM speed control under variable loading conditions. A mathematical model for UM is designed. Two controllers are proposed for controlling the motor speed, output rate controller and output reset controller. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is proposed for tuning the controller’s parameters due to its impact on solving different optimization problems. It possesses fast convergence, minimum algorithm parameters required, lower consecution time and give optimal results without needing large number of iterations. The results are compared and discussed accurately, which show the proposed tuning technique work well and give optimal results for both controllers.