Cooperative containment for second-order multi-agent systems with asynchronous setting and random link failures

Abstract The issue of cooperative containment control in second-order multi-agent systems with asynchronous setting and random link failures is examined in this paper. Asynchronous setting implies that each agent uses its neighbors’ information to update the state independently at certain discrete instants. The phenomenon of random link failure on each communication link is characterized by a Bernoulli stochastic variable. An asynchronous distributed protocol is designed by randomly measuring the position information of the previous one or two steps of the neighbors. Matrix theory and the composition of binary relation are explored to handle the containment control problem with both asynchronous setting and random link failures. Under a loose parameter selection strategy, a necessary and sufficient condition in terms of the topology structure can be established. A numerical example is finally provided to validate the theoretical result.