Ecological rehabilitation of canals in Colombo: a design to harmonize flood control and physical heterogeneity
NRC Grant No: 17-069
Research Institute: University of Moratuwa
Area of Research: Robotics and Intelligent Systems
Status: Ongoing
Summary
This research is focused on the development of an intelligent wheelchair with human like interactive capabilities.
In Sri Lanka, currently large number of amputees and disabled persons who needs care at a higher degree are living in different living standards. These include large number of war casualties. Furthermore there are continuous addition to these numbers due to accidents and medical reasons. Only limited facilities and places are available in Sri Lanka under government and non-governmental organizations. In addition there is a significant increase in the elderly population. However, limited number of human caregivers is available due to socio economic changes and very busy life style of modern society.
Currently world trend is moving in introducing assistive robots for uplifting the living standards of elderly and disabled. Furthermore, very few Sri Lankan research groups are significantly work on research and development related to the advanced technologies on assistive robotic systems including wheelchairs. The proposed intelligent wheelchair can be used to assist elderly or disabled persons in domestic environments or places available for disabled people under Ministry of Defense or other public/private organizations. Proposed wheelchair is able to assist in navigational and daily tasks related to object manipulations and further naturally interact with the human user similar to the human caregivers. Furthermore proposed intelligent wheelchair is adaptable as a companion for a user or group of users.
Similarly, this project will contribute to uplift the living standards of elderly and disabled community in Sri Lanka. It is very important to initiate this kind of developments and research in Sri Lanka due to the context depended nature.
Objectives
- Develop an intelligent system that facilitates the forming of self-awareness of the intelligent robotic wheelchair about the environment.
- Develop an intelligent system to enhance the understanding of user instruction based on the information conveyed nonverbally.
- Develop an intelligent system in order to have safe and human friendly navigation and task execution inside human populated dynamic environments.
- Integrate the intelligent system mentioned in I, II and III and develop the intelligent robotic wheelchair and train for selected navigation tasks in domestic environment in Sri Lankan context.