Prescribed-time containment control based on distributed observer for multi-agent systems.

The prescribed-time containment control problem for second-order multi-agent systems with multiple leaders is studied in this paper. The control objective is that all the followers are able to enter the convex hull formed by leaders at any preassigned time. Suppose that only a few followers can obtain the information of leaders, we design the distributed observer to estimate the information of the convex hull spanned by leaders firstly. Furthermore, the prescribed-time containment controller is designed with the estimation of the distributed observer. Based on a nonlinear scaling function, the tracking process is divided into four stages. The results imply that the tracking error between the followers and the convex hull could converge to zero within prescribed time. Finally, two numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]