Integral Reinforcement-Learning-Based Optimal Containment Control for Partially Unknown Nonlinear Multiagent Systems

This paper focuses on the optimal containment control problem for the nonlinear multiagent systems with partially unknown dynamics via an integral reinforcement learning algorithm. By employing integral reinforcement learning, the requirement of the drift dynamics is relaxed. The integral reinforcement learning method is proved to be equivalent to the model-based policy iteration, which guarantees the convergence of the proposed control algorithm. For each follower, the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation is solved by a single critic neural network with a modified updating law which guarantees the weight error dynamic to be asymptotically stable. Through using input–output data, the approximate optimal containment control protocol of each follower is obtained by applying the critic neural network. The closed-loop containment error system is guaranteed to be stable under the proposed optimal containment control scheme. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented control scheme.