Output Containment Control of Heterogeneous Linear Multiagent Systems With Unbounded Distributed Transmission Delays

In this article, the output containment control problem of heterogeneous linear multiagent systems (MASs) with unbounded distributed transmission delays is considered. A key technical lemma is first established to show that the distributed observers under unbounded distributed transmission delays can be utilized to estimate the convex combination of the states of multiple leaders. Then, a novel distributed output feedback control law is proposed based on those distributed observers. It is shown that under our proposed control law, the output of each follower converges to the convex hull spanned by the outputs of the leaders. In addition, our results include relevant results on output containment control of MASs with bounded distributed or constant transmission delays as special cases. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control law is demonstrated by a simulation example.