Output containment control for swarm systems with general linear dynamics: A dynamic output feedback approach

Output containment control problems for high-order linear time-invariant swarm systems under directed interaction topologies are investigated using a dynamic output feedback approach. Firstly, to propel the outputs of followers to converge to the convex hull formed by the outputs of leaders, a dynamic output containment protocol is presented. Then necessary and sufficient conditions for swarm systems to achieve output containment are proposed. To ensure the scalability of the criteria, a sufficient condition which only includes two linear matrix inequality constraints independent of the number of agents is further presented. Moreover, an approach independent of the number of agents is proposed to determine the gain matrices in the dynamic output containment protocols. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate theoretical results. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.