Distributed reference model based containment control of second-order multi-agent systems

This paper addresses the distributed containment control problem in a group of agents governed by second-order sampled-data dynamics with directed network topologies. Based on the assumption on the communication topology between agents, a distributed reference model based containment controller is adopted to drive the followers to the convex hull spanned by leaders. By studying the performance of the reference models connected in a distributed network and discussing the limiting behavior of agents by treating the effects of error states of reference models as disturbances in a tracking problem, it can be proved that the containment control problem can be solved by the proposed controller with appropriate sample period and control parameters. Finally, numerical examples are used to illustrate our theoretical results.