Formation-containment control of second-order multi-agent systems with time delays

Formation-containment control problem is investigated for the second-order multi-agent systems with distinct time-varying delays. By using Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and linear matrix inequality, delay-dependent sufficient conditions are obtained for the leaders reaching a prescribed formation and the followers converging into the convex hull formed by leaders, respectively. Moreover, the correctness of control strategies is illustrated by numerical simulations.

I. Introduction

In recent years, coordination control of multi-agent systems has attracted a lot of attention from various research fields, such as sensor networks [1], multi-robot cooperative work [2] and formation control of UAVs [3]. Furthermore, consensus seeking, formation control and containment control have become the hottest issues of coordination control of multi-agent systems.