Prescribed-time containment control of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems based on distributed observer

This paper investigates the prescribed-time containment control problem for multi-agent systems with high-order nonlinear dynamics under a directed communication topology. Firstly, in view of the fact that only some follower agents can directly access the state information of multiple leader agents, a prescribed-time distributed observer is put forward to estimate the convex hull spanned by these leaders. Then, with the help of the distributed observer, a novel containment control method is developed for each follower based on a time-varying scaling function, so that all followers can converge to the convex hull spanned by the states of multiple leaders within a prescribed time. The comparison with the finite-time and fixed-time control methods differs in that the convergence time of the method proposed in this paper is independent of the initial conditions and control parameters and can be arbitrarily preassigned according to actual needs. Finally, an example is given to demonstrate the usefulness of the prescribed-time containment control method.