Adaptive Distributed Formation-Containment Control on Switching Directed Networks: A Dynamic Triggering Framework

This article addresses the time-varying formation-containment control problem for networked second-order systems with unknown nonlinear dynamics. The communication topology among agents is switching and directed. To simultaneously achieve formation configuration for leaders and accomplish containment behavior for followers, adaptive distributed formation and containment control schemes are developed. In the control framework design, the neural-network control technique is utilized to approximate the unknown nonlinear dynamics. The update frequency and computation resources of the controllers are reduced by dynamic triggering mechanisms. It is proved that no agent exhibits the Zeno behavior on the time-varying asymmetric communication topology. Moreover, no prior knowledge of global information is needed in controller and triggering mechanism implementations. All system parameters can be easily and flexibly chosen. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.