Prescribed Performance Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Using Disturbance Observer

This article focuses on the containment control problem for nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) with unknown disturbance and prescribed performance in the presence of dead-zone output. The fuzzy-logic systems (FLSs) are used to approximate the unknown nonlinear function, and a nonlinear disturbance observer is used to estimate unknown external disturbances. Meanwhile, a new distributed containment control scheme is developed by utilizing the adaptive compensation technique without assumption of the boundary value of unknown disturbance. Furthermore, a Nussbaum function is utilized to cope with the unknown control coefficient, which is caused by the nonlinearity in the output mechanism. Moreover, a second-order tracking differentiator (TD) is introduced to avoid the repeated differentiation of the virtual controller. The outputs of the followers converge to the convex hull spanned by the multiple dynamic leaders. It is shown that all the signals are semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB), and the local neighborhood containment errors can converge into the prescribed boundary. Finally, the effectiveness of the approach proposed in this article is illustrated by simulation results.

I. Introduction

Over the last few decades, there has been a standing concern about the multiagent systems (MASs) from both academic and industrial communities, which have been widely used in many areas, such as cooperative surveillance [1], sensor networks [2], spacecraft formation flying [3], and so forth [4]–[6]. The number of leaders categorize the cooperative problem into three classes, namely, the leaderless consensus [7]; the leader-following tracking with one leader [8], [9]; and the containment control [10]–[12]. As an important control problem of MASs, containment control has received widespread attention in recent years. In the containment control problem, there exist multiple leaders and followers, and the followers will move in the convex hull spanned by the leaders. Containment control has been investigated by many scholars due to its potential applications in practice, such as dangerous material handling, enemy search, and fire rescue. To name a few, a containment control scheme was designed in [10] for heterogeneous MASs. The work in [11] studied the distributed containment control problem for double-integrator dynamics in the presence of both stationary and dynamic leaders. Cao and Ren [12] proposed a novel containment control method, in which the problems of fixed and switching directed network topologies were considered.