This paper concerns the problem of formation-containment control for general-linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with both communication delays and switching interaction topologies. On the one hand, the leaders can communicate with each other to form the desired formation and on the other, the followers need to enter the convex envelope spanned by the multiple leaders. Firstly, by using the neighbouring relative information, formation-containment protocols are designed for each leader and follower, where an edge-based state observer is incorporated into the formation-containment controller to evaluate the whole leaders' state. Secondly, according to the linear matrix inequality technology, an algorithm is given to determine the unknown feedback matrixes in the protocol. Then, based on Lyapunov theory, the formation-containment error is proved to be convergent and formation feasibility conditions are also presented for the MASs to achieve formation-containment. Finally, a simulation on several MASs is provided to demonstrate the theoretical results.
1Recently, due to the benefit of high scalability and low computing consumption, coordinated control of MASs has received considerable attention in various aeries, for example, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [1, 2], satellite systems [3-6], and underactuated surface vessels [7]. Moreover, its research fields can be classified into different categories, for instance, consensus control approach [8-13], formation control problem [14-18], containment control approach [19][20][21][22], and formation-containment control approach [23][24][25][26].This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.