Output containment control of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems: A new perspective

In this paper, a new perspective on the output containment control of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems is shown. By introducing a new neighborhood error of follower agents, the output containment control problem can be formulated into a cooperative output regulation problem. A novel dynamic compensator is provided to handle the case with multiple leaders. Applying the Riccati equation approach, distributed dynamic protocol is proposed for each follower agent to solve the cooperative output regulation problem, and thus the output containment control problem. It is shown that the outputs of all the followers converge to the dynamic convex hull spanned by the outputs of the leaders, provided that every follower agent is reachable from at least one leader agent. A numerical example is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.