  This paper investigates the cooperative control of multiple unmanned and
manned vehicles via an output containment control approach for heterogeneous
discrete-time multiagent systems. The unmanned vehicles act as leading vehicles
to guide the manned vehicles, i.e., following vehicles. The objective is to
develop a distributed output feedback control law such that the output of the
following vehicles can converge to the convex hull spanned by the output of the
leading vehicles exponentially. The convex hull formed by the output of the
leading vehicles and the system matrix of leading vehicles are estimated via a
distributed containment observer. Based on this observer, a distributed dynamic
output feedback control protocol is first devised for heterogeneous
discrete-time multi-agent systems using only neighboring relative output
information. The proof is depicted by showing certain output containment errors
converge to zero exponentially, which indicates the containment control
objective is well achieved. A distributed dynamic state-feedback control law is
deduced as a special case of the output feedback control. Finally, numerical
simulations with application to cooperative control of multiple vehicles
validate the effectiveness and the computational feasibility of the proposed
control protocols.
