Robust containment control for a class of heterogeneous uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems in lower triangular form

Abstract

This paper studies the robust containment control problem for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems in lower triangular form with parameter uncertainty. The agents are heterogenous with the particularity that the dynamics of the leaders are totally different from those of the followers. The interconnection topology is described by a general directed graph. Based on the distributed internal model, the robust containment control problem is first converted into the stabilisation problem for an augmented network. A distributed state feedback control is then proposed to solve the stabilisation problem of the subsequent augmented network by the block backstepping technique. Under the proposed control, all the followers' outputs will converge to the convex hull spanned by the leaders.