Event-based containment control for multi-agent systems with packet dropouts

This paper is concerned with the event-triggered containment control for stochastic multi-agent systems subject to packet dropouts. The adopted event-triggered protocol is with absolutely triggered conditions catering for the requirement of real-time to an extreme. In light of such a protocol, a novel definition of containment control in mean-square sense, named as χ-containment, is proposed to better describe the tracking dynamics of followers. Based on relative measurement outputs, the purpose of this paper is to design an output-feedback controller such that all followers converge into the convex hull spanned by leaders. First, with the help of the property of the Laplacian matrix, the containment control problem is transformed to an easily setting step by step. Then, sufficient conditions with the form of matrix inequalities are derived to guarantee the desired χ-containment which depends on the initial values and the event-triggered thresholds. By introducing a free matrix combined with an orthogonal basis of the null space of control matrix, the controller gain can be obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a simulation example is given to verify the effectiveness of the designed control protocol.