Containment control with delays, velocity constraints and position constraints in directed changing networks

This paper discusses a containment problem of multi-agent networks with inconsistently bounded communication time delays in directed changing topologies, where the velocity and position of each follower are, respectively, confined in a nonconvex set and a convex set during its movement. A projection-based distributed control protocol is developed to drive all followers into a target convex area spanned by some given leaders, and a sufficient condition for achieving the constrained containment is established. It is proven that the constrained containment problem can be solved by the developed control protocol only if every follower can communicate with no less than one stationary leader directly or indirectly in the union of the communication topologies. Eventually, a representative simulation experiment is performed to verify the main results.