Distributed containment control of linear multi-agent systems with multiple leaders and reduced-order controllers

This paper considers the containment control problems for both continuous-time and discrete-time multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics under directed communication topologies. Distributed reduced-order observer-based containment controllers relying on the relative outputs of neighboring agents are constructed for both continuous-time and discrete-time cases, under which the states of the followers will asymptotically converge to the convex hull formed by those of the leaders if for each follower there exists at least one leader that has a directed path to that follower. Sufficient conditions on the existence of these containment controllers are given.