Zhe Yang, Xiao-wu Mu* and Kai Liu
International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems, vol. 15, no. 1, pp.442-449, 2017

Abstract : "This paper devotes itself to the containment tracking problem of general linear high-order multiagent systems (MASs) under time-varying communications. For general linear MASs with time-varying weightunbalanced digraph, the containment control problem is difficult and challenging, because the Lyapunov method is not an effective approach in this case. Under the assumption that the graph topology uniformly and jointly has a directed spanning forest, we show that when the exponentially unstable mode associated with each agent’s self-dynamics is weak enough, the followers can asymptotically tend to the dynamical convex hull spanned by the leaders, i.e. the containment can be achieved. Moreover, the least convergence rate is explicitly specified. Simulations are also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our result."

Keyword : Containment control, directed spanning forest, dynamic topology, multi-agent systems.