Output-Based Containment Control for Uncertain Nonaffine Nonlinear Multiagent Systems

Containment control is an important issue in the consensus problem of multiagent systems (MASs). This article presents an output-based containment control strategy for a class of nonaffine nonlinear MASs with uncertainies and directed topology. With the help of differential homeomorphism transform and the idea of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC), a nonaffine nonlinear MAS is transformed into an affine one with uncertainties. Two filters with extended states in each follower are designed with the idea of extended state observer to reconstruct the states of the transformed MAS. Then, uncertainties of the MAS are compensated with the help of the estimations of the extended states. Moreover, the derivative of the virtual control signal in the backstepping technique is replaced by a tracking differentiator (TD), overcoming the so-called "explosion of complexity" problem. By means of Lyapunov theory, the containment errors of the followers are proven to converge to a small neighborhood around the origin via an appropriate choice of parameters. Simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the proposed control strategy.