An Output Containment Approach to Cooperative Control of Multiple Unmanned and Manned Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed output containment control method for heterogeneous multiagent systems, enabling unmanned and manned vehicles to cooperatively follow leading vehicles by ensuring their outputs stay within a convex hull, with proven exponential convergence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed output feedback control law and a containment observer for heterogeneous discrete-time multi-agent systems, ensuring exponential convergence to the convex hull formed by leader outputs.

Findings

The proposed control law guarantees exponential convergence of follower outputs to the convex hull.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness and computational feasibility of the control protocols.

The method applies to heterogeneous systems with only local relative output information.

Abstract

This paper investigates the cooperative control of multiple unmanned and manned vehicles via an output containment control approach for heterogeneous discrete-time multiagent systems. The unmanned vehicles act as leading vehicles to guide the manned vehicles, i.e., following vehicles. The objective is to develop a distributed output feedback control law such that the output of the following vehicles can converge to the convex hull spanned by the output of the leading vehicles exponentially. The convex hull formed by the output of the leading vehicles and the system matrix of leading vehicles are estimated via a distributed containment observer. Based on this observer, a distributed dynamic output feedback control protocol is first devised for heterogeneous discrete-time multi-agent systems using only neighboring relative output information. The proof is depicted by showing certain output containment errors converge to zero exponentially, which indicates the containment control objective is well achieved. A distributed dynamic state-feedback control law is deduced as a special case of the output feedback control. Finally, numerical simulations with application to cooperative control of multiple vehicles validate the effectiveness and the computational feasibility of the proposed control protocols.