Department Publications

This paper introduces techniques for designing and implementing remotely controllable outdoor robots with the ability to localize itself while traversing in hazardous environments. The robot platform designed is a semi-autonomous tiller modified as required by the application. Localization based on wireless sensor network which has been a research interest of is addressed here with the use of Zigbee protocol. A Kalman filter was applied for the initial gathering of training data. For the improvement of the accuracy of position estimation, a fuzzy inference system is introduced. An extended Kalman filter is applied at the end in order to fuse the encoder data with the filtered RSS data. Results prove that a metric accuracy varying from 2m to 10m is achievable depending on the location of the robot with respect to the sensor nodes.

Sustainable retrofit of community buildings is a timely and strategic approach to reduce the community buildings’ greenhouse gas emission contribution. The objective of the project entitled Sustainable renewal/retrofit of public buildings is to deliver reliable and strategic plans for sustainable renewal of community buildings. This paper reports the work carried out in the first phase of the post-evaluation stage of the Sustainable renewal/retrofit of public buildings project. The pilot trial version of the dual purpose sensor network is discussed here. The first version of ZigBee (IEEE 802.15) based wireless sensor network is developed to measure the Indoor Environment Quality of the building which is capable of performing post-retrofit validation for the project.

A satellite elephant collar is a device mounted on an elephant's neck to track its position and movements. This information is essential for conservation and management of this highly endangered species. Currently available units are proprietary designs by few manufacturers and no literature can be found about their internal operation. This lack of published information hampers the evolution and development of future collaring systems with increased features and functionalities for research, conservation and management. Critical issues for improvement include live time of the collar, which is related to power consumption and operational modes of the unites, and remote programmability allowing for changes in data acquisition during deployment. Most commercially available collars lack the ability to change data acquisition schedules remotely over the air, and therefore data acquisition is un-optimized, which is …

Lankan agricultural community. The objective of this paper is to identify the methods and implementations that can be applied to the agricultural sector of Sri Lanka. While composing the framework with identified implementations the cost, scientific and technological knowledge of the farmers were taken into consideration.

It is known that every working day millions of drivers are looking for a place to park and most of the urban traffic occur due to the drivers loitering in search of parking spaces. We wished to offer a simple solution to this problem by implementing a car park navigating system using ultrasonic sensors. RS-485 protocol, a mobile application and Bluetooth communication. The system indicates whether the car park is full or not and provide a simple navigation to the driver to the vacant spot.