Command filtered backstepping‐based containment control for a class of multi‐agent systems with uncertainty

Summary In this paper, a novel containment control scheme is designed for multi‐agent systems with unknown parameters and unknown control coefficients. To achieve the containment control goal, containment reference signals are generated using a certain number of dynamic leaders. Then, the followers directly receiving the reference signals can track their generated reference signals, and the rest of the followers track a certain number of estimated signals generated by designed dynamic equations. Under the backstepping framework, uncertainties of a multi‐agent system are compensated for through the adaptive bound estimation method. Additionally, the command filtered technique is adopted to avoid the cumbersome steps of multiple derivative calculations, and to simplify the operations of the control scheme. Finally, the stability of the closed‐loop multi‐agent system is proved based on the Lyapunov theory. The advantage of the proposed scheme is that the containment reference signal and the position between followers can be adjusted arbitrarily by adjusting the relevant parameters. Through simulations, the effectiveness and superiority of the designed controller are verified.