Distributed containment control for second‐order multiagent systems with time delay and intermittent communication

Summary This paper studies the containment control problem for second‐order multiagent systems with intermittent communications and time‐varying delays. Under the common assumption that each follower can only communicate with its neighbors over some disconnected time intervals, some distributed controllers are designed such that all the followers can converge to convex hull formed by the leaders. Firstly, a distributed intermittent control protocol without considering time delays is proposed for second‐order containment control with intermittent communications. Then, under delayed and intermittent communication, a kind of distributed containment control algorithm is derived for second‐order multiagent systems with time‐varying delays. Based on the Lyapunov function technology and the intermittent control method, some sufficient conditions are presented to guarantee that the second‐order multiagent systems can achieve intermittent containment control under fixed topology. As an extension, similar results are obtained for containment control under switching topology. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the theoretical analysis.