H∞ output containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems via distributed dynamic output feedback

This paper addresses the problem of output containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs), which aims to drive the outputs of all followers to a dynamic convex hull spanned by the outputs of multiple leaders. The considered MAS consists of heterogeneous linear agent dynamics with possibly non-identical state dimensions and subject to unknown external disturbances. New distributed control protocols via dynamic output feedback are proposed, such that the output containment control problem can be decomposed into independent H∞ stabilization subproblems for the follower agents. The resulting distributed control synthesis conditions are formulated as linear matrix equations plus linear matrix inequalities, which can be solved efficiently via convex optimization. Both continuous-time and discrete-time output containment control problems are addressed under a unifying framework. Two examples have been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.