  This paper considers the containment control problem for multi-agent systems
with general linear dynamics and multiple leaders whose control inputs are
possibly nonzero and time varying. Based on the relative states of neighboring
agents, a distributed static continuous controller is designed, under which the
containment error is uniformly ultimately bounded and the upper bound of the
containment error can be made arbitrarily small, if the subgraph associated
with the followers is undirected and for each follower there exists at least
one leader that has a directed path to that follower. It is noted that the
design of the static controller requires the knowledge of the eigenvalues of
the Laplacian matrix and the upper bounds of the leaders' control inputs. In
order to remove these requirements, a distributed adaptive continuous
controller is further proposed, which can be designed and implemented by each
follower in a fully distributed fashion. Extensions to the case where only
local output information is available are discussed.
