Containment control of continuous-time linear multi-agent systems with aperiodic sampling

In this paper, the containment control problem of continuous-time linear multi-agent systems is investigated. An aperiodic sampled-data based protocol is induced by using neighboring information with uncertainly time-varying sampling intervals. By utilizing the proposed protocol and properties of Laplacian matrix, the containment control problem of continuous-time linear multi-agent systems is equivalently transformed into a stability problem of discrete-time linear systems. The stability analysis is based on the robustness of related discrete-time systems against perturbation caused by the variation of sampling intervals. By using small-gain theorem, sufficient conditions are obtained to guarantee the stability of uncertain discrete-time systems. Furthermore, two special cases are given to illustrate the method proposed in this paper. The theoretical results are verified by some simulations.