The work carried out in this paper proposes an improvement of the direct torque control (DTC) of induction machine by the design of modern, robust and more efficient controllers than the conventional PI controllers commonly used for speed control. A comparative study has been carried out using five controllers, i.e. PI anti-windup, first-order sliding mode control (SMC), second order sliding mode control (SOSMC), fuzzy logic controller (Fuzzy-PI) and hybrid Fuzzy second-order sliding mode controller (FSOSMC). An advanced optimization technique based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has been utilized to optimize all of these controllers, the use of PSO for the determination of the different gains used in all controllers gives on the one hand a high accuracy performance and ensures on the other hand a reliable comparison between the different controllers in their optimal states. The simulation and analysis of each method with respect to robustness to disturbances was performed externally under various operating conditions and variations of the machine parameters.