Containment of Higher-Order Multi-Leader Multi-Agent Systems: A Dynamic Output Approach

This technical note addresses the distributed containment control problem for a linear multi-leader multi-agent system with a directed communication topology. A new class of distributed observer-type containment protocols based only on the relative output measurements of the neighboring agents is proposed, removing the impractical assumption in some of the existing approaches that the observers embedded in the multiple dynamic agents have to share information with their neighbors. Under the mild assumption that, for each follower, there exists at least one leader having a directed path to that follower, some sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the states of the followers to asymptotically converge to a convex hull formed by those of the dynamic leaders. Finally, some numerical simulations on containment of a multi-vehicle system are given to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results.