Distributed Containment Control of Multi-Agent Systems with Velocity and Acceleration Saturations

This paper studies the problem of distributed containment control for multi-agent systems modeled by double integrators. A new class of rotation-free distributed containment controllers with successive saturated loops is proposed for the challenging situation where the velocity and acceleration of each agent are required to stay within their desired ranges. It is proved that the objective of containment control is achievable if the parameters of the controllers satisfy a mild condition. Moreover, the desired ranges of the accelerations and the velocities are allowed to be very small, and the interconnection topology is allowed to be directed and switched.