Backstepping-based tunable containment control for a class of second-order multi-agent systems

Aiming at the problem of non-tunable reference signals in the existing containment schemes for multi-agent systems (MASs), an innovative containment control scheme is proposed. The backstepping method is utilized to design controllers to guide agents, so as to realize the containment control objective by generating a set of tunable reference signals. If the reference signals are not available, then a set of estimators is designed to generate estimated reference signals to ensure that the agents are still able to accomplish the containment control task. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme incorporates a command filtered technique to reduce the computational complexity arising from the large number of partial derivative operations in the backstepping design. The tracking errors of MASs are proved to be bounded by Lyapunov stability analysis. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is reasonable and effective.