Thales C Silva

GRASP Lab, UPenn

3330, Walnut St

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at GRASP Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Dr. Ani Hsieh. I received my M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, under the supervision of Dr. Luciano Pimenta and Dr. Fernando Souza.

My current research interests include time-delay systems, coordination of multi-robot systems subject to dynamical restrictions, and stability analysis of nonlinear systems. I am also interested in the efficient representation of high-dimensional systems to design effective control strategies.

selected publications

TCON

Regional Consensus in Discrete-Time Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Time-Varying Delays and Saturating Actuators

Silva, Thales C., Leite, Valter J. S., Souza, Fernando O., and Pimenta, Luciano C.A.

International Journal of Control 2022

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IJSS

Consensus in multi-agent systems subject to input saturation and time-varying delays

Silva, Thales C., Souza, Fernando O., and Pimenta, Luciano C.A.

International Journal of Systems Science 2021

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This paper deals with the problem of consensus in multi-agent systems. The consensus is investigated considering directed networks composed by identical agents described by linear models of arbitrary order, subject to input saturation and non-uniform time-varying delays. The main results are sufficient conditions for consensus analysis and design of distributed consensus protocols for multi-agent systems. In addition, because the saturation might prevent the multi-agent system to attain consensus on some set of initial conditions, it is also proposed a strategy to calculate a region in which the consensus is guaranteed. The results follow from the Lyapunov–Krasovskii theory and are formulated in the linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) framework. Finally, we present examples to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in contrast with similar approaches existing in the literature.
RNC

Distributed formation-containment control with Euler-Lagrange systems subject to input saturation and communication delays

Silva, Thales C., Souza, Fernando O., and Pimenta, Luciano C.A.

International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control 2020

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This paper is concerned with the problem of formation-containment on networked systems, with interconnected systems modeled by the Euler-Lagrange equation with bounded inputs and time-varying delays on the communication channels. The main results are the design of control algorithms and sufficient conditions to ensure the convergence of the network. The control algorithms are designed as distributed dynamic controllers, in such a way that the number of neighbors of each agent is decoupled from the bound of the control inputs. That is, in the proposed approach the amplitude of the input signal does not directly increase with the number of neighbors of each agent. The proposed sufficient conditions for the asymptotic convergence follow from the Lyapunov-Krasovskii theory and are formulated in the linear matrix inequalities framework. The conditions rely only on the upper bound of delays and on a subset of the controller parameters, but they do not depend on the model of each agent, which makes it suitable for networks with agents governed by distinct dynamics. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method we present numerical examples and compare with similar approaches existing in the literature.