Formation-containment control of second-order multi-agent systems with only sampled position data

This paper studies the formation-containment control problem of second-order multi-agent systems with only sampled position data. It is assumed that there exist interactions among leaders and the leaders’ neighbours are only leaders. Two different control protocols with only sampled position information are proposed for followers and leaders, respectively. By the algebraic graph theory and matrix theory, sufficient conditions are given to guarantee that the leaders achieve a desired formation and the followers asymptotically converge into the convex hull formed by the corresponding states of the leaders, i.e. the multi-agent systems achieve formation-containment. Moreover, an explicit expression of the formation position function is given for each leader. Finally, a numerical simulation is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of theoretical results.