Fully distributed output formation-containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems via adaptive observer...

For heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems (MASs) in which not all followers have access to the information of multiple leaders, this paper studies the distributed output formation-containment problem. By converting the research question into the cooperative output regulation problem, a fully distributed control framework via a fully adaptive observer approach is developed. Since a part of the followers cannot directly access the states of leaders, a new observer is designed for reconstructing the system matrices and state information. Specifically, by introducing adaptive gains in place of fixed coupling coefficients in the observer design, the global topological information is no longer needed. Moreover, the conventional regulator equations cannot be directly applied for controller synthesis due to the time-varying estimated system matrices of the leaders. To overcome this challenge, the adaptive regulator equations are developed to dynamically compute the controller gains. Subsequently, both state and output feedback control strategies are presented to achieve the desired output formation-containment control objective. The validation of the proposed method is performed in the simulation results with practical and comparative examples.