Formation-containment control of networked Euler–Lagrange systems: An event-triggered framework

To improve the concurrency of leaders’ formation and followers’ containment, a difficult problem of designing the formation controller and the containment controller simultaneously should be addressed for networked systems. Motivated by this, this paper presents an even-triggered control framework for networked Euler–Lagrange systems to achieve formation-containment control even in the presence of uncertain parameters. An event-triggered formation controller is firstly designed for leaders to achieve the desired configuration. An event-triggered containment control law is then developed to guarantee that all the followers can converge to the convex hull formed by leaders. The key feature of the containment control law is that it does not necessitate any relative velocity information with respect to neighbor followers. Each controller’s gains are adaptively tuned using only local information. The parametric uncertainties are accommodated by using the adaptive updating law. Zeno behaviors of the triggering time sequences are also excluded. As a result, the communication burden of formation-containment system can be reduced. Numerical simulation is finally presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed event-triggered formation-containment control framework. •To improve the concurrency of leaders’ formation and followers’ containment, this paper presents an even-triggered control framework for networked Euler-Lagrange systems with parametric uncertainties to achieve the formation-containment control.•An event-triggered formation controller is firstly designed for leaders to achieve the desired formation configuration. An event-triggered containment control law is then developed to guarantee that all the followers can converge to the convex hull formed by leaders. The key feature of the containment control law is that it does not necessitate any relative velocity information with respect to neighbor followers.•Each designed controller’s gains are adaptively tuned using only local information. The parametric uncertainties are accommodated by using the adaptive updating law. The communication burden of the formation-containment system is reduced.