Robust Containment Control in Multi-Agent Systems with Common Coordinate Frames and Bearing Angle Measurements

In this paper, the robust containment control problem in multi-agent systems (MASs) with multiple static leaders and with malicious agents is addressed. In our setting, we define as malicious all those agents which do not implement the local control protocol executed by the followers in the MAS. On the contrary, we assume malicious agents apply a control input of their own choice with the intent of jeopardizing the cooperation in order to bring the followers arbitrarily away from a containment area, i.e., an hypercube defined by the location of the leaders. For this setting, a distributed protocol, which is proven to be robust against malicious agents under certain topological conditions, is considered. It is assumed that the agents move in a d-dimensional hyperplane, share a common coordinate system, do not require access to absolute positions (GPS) and are able to measure bearing angles of their neighbors. A theoretical characterization of the proposed algorithm is provided together with numerical results.