https://doi.org/./..
Distributed adaptive containment control for high-order nonlinear multi-agent
systems
Jianzhong Gu
a
, Wuquan Li
a
and Hongyong Yang
b
a
School of Mathematics and Statistics Science, Ludong University, Yantai, China;
b
School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Ludong University,
Yantai, China
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received July
Accepted January
KEYWORDS
Containment control;
nonlinear parameterisation;
high-order nonlinear
multi-agent systems;
directed topology
ABSTRACT
This paper considers the adaptive containment control of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with
nonlinear parameterisation. Without imposing any conditions on the unknown nonlinearities and unknown
parameters, the distributed controllers are constructed recursively with only neighbours’ information by
using the backstepping design method. Under the assumption that the leaders set is globally reachable,
it is shown that all the signals of the closed-loop systems are global uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB),
and all the followers will exponentially converge to the convex hull spanned by the dynamic leaders with
adjustable tracking errors. Finally, two simulation examples demonstrate the eectiveness of the control
scheme.
1. Introduction
In the past decade, distributed coordination of the network
of dynamic agents has attracted considerable attention of
researchers because of the broad applications in various elds
such as aggregation behaviour of animals, collective motion of
particles, distributed computations and formation control. Con-
sensusisoneofthemostpopulartopicsinthisarea,anda
large number of eective control approaches have been pro-
posedtosolvetheconsensusproblemforlinearandnonlin-
ear multi-agent systems, deterministic and stochastic systems
(Cao, Ren, & Egerstedt, 2012;Cui,Ren,&Ge,2012;Li,2015;
Gu, Li, & Yang, 2017;Guo,Song,&Li,2016;Hu&Hong,
2007; Jadbabaie, Lin, & Morse, 2003;Li&Zhang,2014;Luo,
Wang, & Ren, 2014;Min,Sun,&Li,2011; Olfati-Saber &
Murray, 2004;Ren,2008). For the multiple leaders case, the
consensus-like problem called the containment control, where
thefollowersaredrivenintotheconvexhullspannedbythe
multiple leaders. The containment control problems for various
multi-agent systems, such as single-integrator dynamics (Cao,
Stuart, Ren, & Meng, 2011;Li,Xie,&Zhang,2015), double-
integrator dynamics (Li, Ren, Liu, & Ma, 2013;Zheng&Wang,
2014) and general linear systems (Liu, Xie, & Wang, 2012), have
been extensively studied.
Since many physical systems are nonlinear, it is necessary and
benecial to study the containment control problem of nonlin-
ear dynamical systems. In comparison with the development of
networked linear systems, the containment control problem of
nonlinear multi-agent systems needs to be further investigated
duetothecomplexofthesystemstructure.InDimarogonas
et al. (2006)andMei,Ren,&Ma(2012), the distributed con-
tainment control approaches were proposed for nonlinear sys-
tems such as nonholonomic systems and Lagrangian systems,
respectively. Peng, Wang, Zhang, & Sun (2014) considered the
CONTACT Wuquan Li sea@.com
leader–follower synchronisation problem of uncertain nonlin-
ear multiagent systems over undirected and directed interaction
topologies. In Yoo (2013), the dynamic surface design approach
was rst applied to the distributed adaptive containment con-
trol for the uncertain nonlinear systems in strict-feedback form.
Wang, Wang, & Peng (2015) considered the containment control
problem of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems in pure-
feedback form with multiple dynamic leaders under directed
switching topologies. For the stochastic nonlinear multi-agent
systems, Li, Liu, & Feng (2016)proposedadistributedback-
stepping design method for stochastic nonlinear systems with
inherent nonlinear drift and diusion terms. Shahvali and
Askari (2016)proposedadistributedadaptiveneuraldynamic
surface control based on output-feedback design, which guar-
anteed the ultimate boundedness of the tracking errors. It is
worthwhile to mention that in these studies, all the high-order
system models considered do not take into account parametric
uncertainty.
As demonstrated in Annaswamy, Skantze, and Loh (1998)
and Lin and Qian (2002), nonlinear parameterisation can be
found in various practical control problems. To our knowl-
edge, there are no research results on the containment control
of multi-agent systems with nonlinear parameterisation. Moti-
vated by previous works on the control of systems with unknown
parameters and nonlinear functions, we present the distributed
adaptive containment controllers for the high-order nonlinear
multi-agent systems in this paper. The main contributions of the
paper include:
(1) The high-order uncertain multi-agent systems consid-
ered are nonlinearly parameterised. Without impos-
ing any conditions on the unknown nonlinearities and
unknown parameters, distributed adaptive controllers
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONTROL
2019, VOL.92, NO. 10, 2300–2311