Containment Control in Mobile Networks

In this paper, the problem of driving a collection of mobile robots to a given target destination is studied. In particular, we are interested in achieving this transfer in an orderly manner so as to ensure that the agents remain in the convex polytope spanned by the leader-agents, while the remaining agents, only employ local interaction rules. To this aim we exploit the theory of partial difference equations and propose hybrid control schemes based on stop-go rules for the leader-agents. Non-Zenoness, liveness and convergence of the resulting system are also analyzed.