Containment control of discrete‐time multi‐agent systems with application to escort control of multiple vehicles

Abstract

This article investigates the escort control problem for heterogeneous discrete‐time multi‐agent systems with multiple leaders. We develop a distributed output feedback control law such that the followers are secured within the convex hull spanned by the output of the leaders. First, the followers estimate the target convex hull and the system matrices of the leaders via a distributed observer. We then devise a distributed dynamic output feedback control protocol based on this observer to achieve the escort control by using only neighboring relative output information of leaders. The security of the followers is guaranteed by seeing that the output tracking errors converge to zero exponentially. In the numerical simulations, we discuss the potential deployment of the proposed method to a brand‐new escort control of mixed traffic consist of connected automated vehicles and partially automated vehicles. This vehicular escort control formulation can be regarded as a generalization of the conventional vehicular platoon control problem into both longitudinal and lateral dimensions. The numerical results validate the effectiveness and the computational feasibility of the proposed control protocols.

Containment control of networked heterogeneous autonomous surface vehicles: A data‐driven control approach

“…Nevertheless, with the increasing demands for multiple complex tasks, the single leader based coordinated control may not be adequate for modern marine engineering. In this context, the containment control, which requires multiple leaders to coordinate the control system such that all followers can eventually enter into a convex hull that formed by these leaders, emerged and has gradually become a hotspot in the field of coordinated control, for example, the reinforcement learning based containment control, 19 the intermittent protocol based containment control, 20 the distributed observer based containment control, 21 and so forth. Specifically, for the fully actuated multiple ASVs, Peng and Wang et al proposed a modular design scheme, and whereby the estimation modular, controller modular and path updating modular are efficiently developed and cohered to achieve containment control 22 .…”

IT2 fuzzy adaptive containment control for fractional-order heterogeneous multi-agent systems with input saturation

“…Containment control, which involves designing control protocols that urge the state or output of followers into the convex hull spanned by those of leaders, is a common problem in multi-agent system coordination control. Although the containment control problem of integer-order multi-agent systems has been widely studied [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], many physical systems exhibit fractional-order (non-integer) dynamic behaviors due to their unique materials and characteristics, such as microorganisms in under-water environments and unmanned aerial vehicles operating in complex space environments. Compared with integer-order differential equations [17][18][19], fractional-order differential equations have non-local and long-memory effects [20,21], which makes them of great value in studying nonlinear systems, chaotic phenomena, and functional calculus.…”