Constrained containment control problems for multi-agent system with changing communication topologies

Many of the existing papers about the containment control problem for multi-agent systems were built under an ideal setting and only a few works concerned about the physical constraints of the states and the control inputs of the agents. The idea of this paper is to study the set tracking problems multi-agent system subject to convex-position constraints and switching topologies. The first contribution is to find a condition which ensures each agent to have the possibility to track the given set when all agents are assumed to stay in their own convex-position constraint sets. The second contribution is to propose two nonlinear distributed algorithms to guarantee that all agents will ultimately move into a convex hull spanned by all the leaders and introduce an analysis approach to deal with the set tracking problems when position constraints and changing communication topologies are taken into consideration simultaneously.