Reference model-based containment control of multi-agent systems with higher-order dynamics

This study studies the problem of distributed containment control for multi-agent systems with higher-order dynamics under directed network topologies. The higher-order model-based containment controllers with relative damping and absolute damping are proposed, respectively. It is shown that under the proposed containment controllers the followers will converge to the convex hull spanned by the leaders if for each follower, there exists at least one leader that has a directed path to the followers; the final states of the followers depend on the network topology as well as the initial states of the references models of the leaders. The second-order model-based containment controllers are discussed as special cases. Simulation examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.