This paper focuses on the distributed containment control of continuous-time linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with multiple leaders over fixed topology. A parametric dynamic compensated distributed control protocol is proposed in which both the information from the observer in the virtual layer and actual adjacent agents are employed. The necessary and sufficient conditions of the distributed containment control are derived based on the standard linear quadratic regulator (LQR). On this basis, the dominant poles are configured by using the modified linear quadratic regulator (MLQR) optimal control and Geršgorin's circle criterion, hence the containment control with specified convergence speed of the MAS is achieved. Another main advantage of the proposed design is, in the case of virtual layer failure, by adjusting parameters the dynamic control protocol reduces to static, and the convergence speed can still be specified through the dominant pole assignment method combined with inverse optimal control. Finally, typical numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoretical results.
Keywords: containment control; continuous-time MAS; convergence speed; dominant poles assignment.