Surrounding control of nonlinear multi-agent systems with non-identical agents

In this paper, the surrounding control problem of a group of non-identical agents is considered, where a team of followers achieves an equidistant distributed formation to surround a team of moving leaders. An adaptive design method is presented for multi-agent systems where the dynamics of agents are supposed to be nonlinear with unknown parameters. First, an estimator for the center of the leaders is introduced. Then, two distributed adaptive controllers based on the estimated center are proposed for each follower. The stability and parameter convergence of the proposed protocols are shown by using algebraic graph theory and Lyapunov theory. Finally, a numerical example is provided to validate the theoretical results. •A distributed estimator is introduced for followers to estimate the geometric center of leader's position.•Two adaptive control law based on estimated center of leader's position is proposed in two scenario to solve the surrounding control problem.•Analysis of stability of the proposed controllers are conducted based on algebraic graph theory and Lyapunov theory.•Followers with non-identical nonlinear dynamics achieve an equidistant distributed formation around moving leaders.