Distributed bipartite output containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with directed signed graphs

This paper investigates the bipartite output containment control problem by utilising distributed control protocols for heterogeneous multi-agent systems over directed signed graphs. A fully distributed dynamic compensator is proposed to estimate the convex hull and symmetric convex hull spanned by states of leaders. Then, a distributed observer based on neighbour information is presented for estimating the state of each follower. An output feedback control protocol is further given based on the fully distributed dynamic compensator and neighbour-based observer to cope with the bipartite containment control problem of the linear heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Different from the related works, a neighbour-based observer is presented for heterogeneous multi-agent systems, in which the analysis method used in the Luenburger observer cannot be applied directly, because of the heterogeneity. Besides, the dynamics of the agents are allowed to not only have nonidentical coefficient matrices but also have different dimensions. A simulation example is shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the problem of bipartite output containment control in heterogeneous multi-agent systems over directed signed graphs by utilizing distributed control protocols. It proposes a fully distributed dynamic compensator to estimate the convex hull and symmetric convex hull spanned by the states of the leaders. Furthermore, a distributed observer based on neighbor information is presented to estimate the states of the followers. An output feedback control protocol is also provided to deal with the bipartite containment control problem of the linear heterogeneous multi-agent systems based on the fully distributed dynamic compensator and neighbor-based observer.