Lyapunov-Based Output Containment Control of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems With Markovian Switching Topologies and Distributed Delays

This paper considers the mean square output containment control problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems(MASs) with randomly switching topologies and nonuniform distributed delays. By modeling the switching topologies as a continuous-time Markov process and taking the distributed delays into consideration, a novel distributed containment observer is proposed to estimate the convex hull spanned by the leaders’ states.A novel distributed output feedback containment controller is then designed without using the prior knowledge of distributed delays. By constructing a novel switching Lyapunov functional,the output containment control problem is then solved in the sense of mean square under an easily-verifiable sufficient condition. Finally, two numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.