Robust containment of uncertain linear multi-agent systems under adaptive protocols

In this paper, robust containment problem is investigated for a class of multi-leader multi-agent linear systems in the presence of time-varying uncertainties. To achieve containment, a new kind of adaptive containment protocols are proposed for the multi-agent systems. Specifically, the designed protocols consist of a continuous linear term and a discontinuous term. The linear term of the designed protocol is employed to achieve containment while the discontinuous term is utilized to eliminate the effect of uncertain dynamics on the achievement of containment. By using tools from non-smooth analysis and algebraic graph theory, some efficient criteria for achieving robust containment in the closed-loop multi-agent systems are obtained and analyzed. One favorable property of the designed protocol is that containment in the closed-loop multi-agent systems can be achieved in a fully distributed fashion over any given connected and detail-balanced communication graph without using any global information about the communication graph. The effectiveness of the analytical results is finally verified by performing numerical simulations. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.