Containment control of discrete-time multi-agent systems with application to escort control of multiple vehicles

This article investigates the escort control problem for heterogeneous discrete-time multi-agent systems with multiple leaders. We develop a distributed output feedback control law such that the followers are secured within the convex hull spanned by the output of the leaders. First, the followers estimate the target convex hull and the system matrices of the leaders via a distributed observer. We then devise a distributed dynamic output feedback control protocol based on this observer to achieve the escort control by using only neighboring relative output information of leaders. The security of the followers is guaranteed by seeing that the output tracking errors converge to zero exponentially. In the numerical simulations, we discuss the potential deployment of the proposed method to a brand-new escort control of mixed traffic consist of connected automated vehicles and partially automated vehicles. This vehicular escort control formulation can be regarded as a generalization of the conventional vehicular platoon control problem into both longitudinal and lateral dimensions. The numerical results validate the effectiveness and the computational feasibility of the proposed control protocols.