Adaptive Containment of Multi‐Agent Systems Over Switching Topologies With Unbounded Transmission Delays

In this paper, the adaptive containment control problem subject to unbounded transmission delays and switching topologies is addressed for heterogeneous multi‐agent systems. In imperfect communication environments, transmission delays are omnipresent in general and the control implementations of multi‐agent systems should be able to handle the most challenging scenarios with unbounded delays. Given this, an adaptive distributed observer with guaranteed exponential convergence performance is designed by leveraging deferred transmissions, which can also accommodate switching topologies and allow for unknown system matrices of the leaders. Then, a distributed output‐feedback controller is developed to guarantee the outputs of all followers ultimately converge within the convex hull spanned by leaders. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated via a simulation.