Abstract

The pressing need to accelerate the human-resettlement programs in the North and the East of Sri Lanka, the Tsunami in December 2004, the flash floods and the subsequent landslides that took several hundred lives in the central hills in 2003 and 2006 have made it an urgent need to expand the research programs to develop sustainable and appropriate technologies to generate early warnings and to mitigate damages during a disaster management project.

The University of Moratuwa has dedicated its resources to come up with the required solutions to these challenges. The first results of a crawling robot that can carry a metal detector to look for landmines were demonstrated to the deminers. There are positive results in training rodents to sniff for landmines. At present, experiments are done on using animal-robot-human combined systems to detect landmines to maximize sensitivity and efficiency while minimizing cost and the overall risk. A remote controlled UAV and an underwater robot have been constructed to be deployed in a flash flood situation where normal access routes are cut off.

The presentation will also explain some technologies to use animals that had escaped the Tsunami like deer and cows, to sense the sub-sonic waves being propagated through ground as a future technology to predict disasters.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Nanayakkara was born in Galle, Sri Lanka. He graduated with a first class honors degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa in 1996. He secured his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998 and his Ph.D. degree in Systems Control and Robotics from Saga University in 2001. From 2001 – 2003 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.

From 2003 to date, he has been in the faculty of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He is the principle investigator of the “laboratory for intelligent field robots” at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He was awarded the outstanding researcher award of the University of Moratuwa in 2006. He has published 2 book chapters, 7 international journal papers, and 26 international conference papers. He was the founding general Chair of the International Conference on Information and Automation with technical co-sponsorship of IEEE region 10.

He is also the commissioner (chairman) of the Sri Lanka Inventors Commission under the Ministry of Enterprise Development and Investment Promotion that has set up innovators’ circles in 6000 schools, 13 universities, and 50 rural village youth centers and funds their innovative projects. He is also in the board of Governors of the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern technology, board of management of the Industrial Automation Research  Centre of the University of Moratuwa, the board of directors of the Hydro Power International (pvt) Ltd. and Rinzen Laboratories (pvt) Ltd.