Fully distributed containment control of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems using disturbance observer with directed graph

In this paper, we consider the containment control problem of a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems under directed graph, in which the leaders are subject to bounded disturbances and the external disturbances of the followers are generated by some exosystems. Some disturbance observers are presented for the followers to estimate the disturbances asymptotically caused by the exosystems. Then, without requiring any global information of the communication digraph, an adaptive distributed control is proposed based on the designed disturbance observer to ensure that the states of the followers can be driven to converge into the convex hull spanned from the states of the leaders. Finally, simulation examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.