In this paper, we propose two different control strategies for the position control of the ball of the ball and beam system (BBS). The first control strategy uses the proportional integral derivative-second derivative with a proportional integrator PIDD2-PI. The second control strategy uses the tilt integral derivative with filter (TID-F). The designed controllers employ two distinct metaheuristic computation techniques: grey wolf optimization (GWO) and whale optimization algorithm (WOA) for the parameter tuning. We evaluated the dynamic and steady-state performance of the proposed control strategies using four performance indices. In addition, to analyze the robustness of proposed control strategies, a comprehensive comparison has been performed with a variety of controllers, including tilt integral-derivative (TID), fractional order proportional integral derivative (FOPID), integral–proportional derivative (I-PD), proportional integral-derivative (PI-D), and proportional integral proportional derivative (PI-PD). By comparing different test cases, including the variation in the parameters of the BBS with disturbance, we examine step response, set point tracking, disturbance rejection analysis, and robustness of proposed control strategies. The comprehensive comparison of results shows that WOA-PIDD2-PI-ISE and GWO-TID-F- ISE perform superior. Moreover, the proposed control strategies yield oscillation-free, stable, and quick response, which confirms the robustness of the proposed control strategies to the disturbance, parameter variation of BBS, and tracking performance. The practical implementation of the proposed controllers can be in the field of under actuated mechanical systems (UMS), robotics and industrial automation. The proposed control strategies are successfully tested in MATLAB simulation.