Containment control of linear multi-agent systems with multiple leaders of bounded inputs using distributed continuous controllers

• Published in: International journal of robust and nonlinear control Vol. 25; no. 13; pp. 2101 - 2121
• Main Authors: Li, Zhongkui, Duan, Zhisheng, Ren, Wei, Feng, Gang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 10.09.2015; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: adaptive control; consensus; consensus, adaptive control; Containment; containment control; Control systems; Controllers; cooperative control; Dynamical systems; Errors; Followers; multi-agent system; Multiagent systems; Upper bounds
• ISSN: 1049-8923; 1099-1239
• DOI: 10.1002/rnc.3195

SummaryThis paper considers the containment control problem for multi‐agent systems with general linear dynamics and multiple leaders whose control inputs are possibly nonzero and time varying. Based on the relative states of neighboring agents, a distributed static continuous controller is designed, under which the containment error is uniformly ultimately bounded and the upper bound of the containment error can be made arbitrarily small, if the subgraph associated with the followers is undirected and, for each follower, there exists at least one leader that has a directed path to that follower. It is noted that the design of the static controller requires the knowledge of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix and the upper bounds of the leaders’ control inputs. In order to remove these requirements, a distributed adaptive continuous controller is further proposed, which can be designed and implemented by each follower in a fully distributed fashion. Extensions to the case where only local output information is available and to the case of multi‐agent systems with matching uncertainties are also discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.