Distributed dynamic containment control over a strongly connected and weight-balanced digraph

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed containment control solution for a group of communicating mobile agents that aim to track the convex hull spanned by a group of moving leaders with unknown dynamics. The communication topology of the mobile agents is described by a strongly connected and weight-balanced directed graph. In our problem setting the agents can communicate in discrete-time and also detect the leaders in specific sampling times. Our next contribution in this paper is to show how a group of unicycle robots can use our proposed containment control algorithm to track the convex hull of their jointly monitoring mobile leaders. In our proposed framework, the unicycle robots have continuous-time dynamics but communicate with each other in discrete-time fashion. We demonstrate our results through a numerical example.