Containment control of a class of heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper studies the containment control of a class of heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems under general directed graph. Every follower agent is a nonlinear system in the output feedback form with the same relative degree. The authors’ goal is to design a distributed dynamic controller such that the outputs of followers enter the convex hull spanned by the outputs of leaders. To this end, the containment problem is converted into a cooperative output regulation problem, a distributed adaptive recursive procedure and the internal model are employed to design the distributed controller.