Containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems

Abstract

Containment control of multi-agent systems has attracted a lot of research attention lately and there is a significant room for generalizing the results by considering the agent models to be heterogeneous. Attaining containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems using a single gain matrix/controller is a challenging task and not always achievable. In this paper, we propose a strategy to attain containment control for linear second order heterogeneous multi-agent systems using a weighted sum of a derivative term, a proportional term and some integral terms. These weights, chosen using the root locus based method, for a given directed acyclic graph ensure that containment control is possible even when some of the agents have inherently unstable dynamics. The leaders are assumed to follow a given polynomial trajectory and the followers are contained within the convex hull of these leaders’ positions. A number of simulations are presented to vindicate the efficacy of the proposed method for controller design.