Output Containment Control of Discrete-time Multi-agent Systems with Application to Multiple Ground Vehicles.

This paper investigates the output containment control problem for heterogeneous discrete-time multi-agent systems with multiple leaders. The objective is to develop a distributed control law such that the output of the followers can converge to the convex hull spanned by the output of the leaders exponentially. The convex hull formed by the output of the leaders and the system matrix of leaders are estimated via an adaptive distributed containment observer. Based on this observer, a distributed dynamic output feedback control protocol is first devised for heterogeneous discrete-time multi-agent systems using only neighboring relative output information. The proof is depicted by showing certain output containment errors converge to zero exponentially, which indicates the containment control objective is well achieved. A distributed dynamic state-feedback control law is deduced as a special case of the output feedback control. For the application to control multiple ground vehicles, a prescribed offset for maintaining the minimum safety gap between adjacent agents is considered. Finally, numerical simulations with application to ground vehicles validate the effectiveness and the computational feasibility of the proposed control protocols.