Fully distributed time-varying formation-containment control for large-scale nonholonomic vehicles with an unknown real leader

Abstract

This paper addresses the time-varying formation-containment (FC) problem for general linear multi-agent systems based on an observer viewpoint under the directed communication graph which contains a spanning tree. A new format of time-varying formation shapes with the properties of translation, scalability and rotation is proposed. Then the time-varying formation tracking problem where the real leader's input is unknown to all other agents is solved independently. After that, the time-varying FC problem where the challenge is how to deal with the formation-achieving agents' unknown nonzero inputs for containment-achieving agents, is firstly addressed. All the designed controllers, which need no eigenvalue information of the whole graph, are fully distributed and so can be applied to large-scale systems. The influence of communication graph structure to the control convergence rate is further analysed. The above theoretical results are verified by multiple nonholonomic vehicles in simulations.

Keywords:

• Networked control systems
• fully distributed controller (FDC)
• time-varying formation tracking
• formation-containment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Wei Jiang  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2683-9889

Guoguang Wen  http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9128-1802

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant numbers YWF-15-SYS-JTXY-007, YWF-16-BJ-Y-21 and 2017JBM067], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 61403019, 61503016], The National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2017YFB0103202.