Distributed containment control of linear multi-agent systems with multiple higher-dimensional leaders

This paper addresses the distributed containment problem for a class of continuoustime multi-agent systems with multiple higher-dimensional leaders. In the present model, the graph describing the communication topology among the followers is assumed to be fixed and directed, but does not need to meet any connectivity condition. Furthermore, it is assumed that output information of the leader is only available to a small fraction of the followers. To achieve containment, a kind of distributed controllers based only on the local state information is exploited. Under the assumptions that the dynamics of the leaders are detectable and that each follower can directly or indirectly receive information from at least one leader, some sufficient conditions for achieving containment are provided and analyzed. Copyright ? 2013 IFAC.EI