A robot for office work

Another novel student project:

Ramani KANGARAARACHCHI

The Uva Wellassa University (UWU) is the first entrepreneurial university in Sri Lanka known as the Centre of Excellence for value addition. It fulfils the requirement of producing undergraduates with entrepreneurial skills much needed for the country.

This is the fourth of a series of articles based on final year student research reports on value addition which will be useful for industrialists as well as readers.

The objective of this series is to encourage and introduce country's future entrepreneurs, to make industrialists and other relevant parties aware of potential businesses. Interested parties can contact the Uva-Wellassa University for more details.

Ranjan Kulatunga, a final year student of Uva Wellassa University Badulla specializing in Mechatronics has developed a service robot to serve in the office environment.

The main task of this robot is to transfer documents in an office to a specified location safely.

The cabin assigned to place documents in the robot is password protected and therefore unauthorized people cannot remove the documents from the cabin.

Ranjan, who is a past pupil of Katugastota Sri Rahula Vidyalaya has also invented a digital temperature controller, semi autonomous tele operated mobile robot, obstacle avoiding mobile robot-strain gauge measuring system earlier other than this service robot.

He has also done a quantitative reasoning survey to find out the factors affecting the frequent power failure in the Badulla town area.

His ambition is to become a good innovator and a risk taker while performing well in the industry.

Robotics and Automation is his interested area. Ranjan said that mobile autonomous service robots are becoming very popular, from domestic uses as automatic lawnmowers and robotic vacuum cleaners to field applications as cargo, surveillance, agriculture, military, and even interplanetary exploration, to cite some.

Many different technologies are used, and quite heterogeneous approaches are developed to achieve the degree of mobility that such robots require, depending on the application.

Main Groups

According to Ranjan these applications can be typically divided into two main groups: Indoor mobile robots are usually designed to operate in a human structured environment, while outdoor and field service mobile robots work in a less structured environments.

Among the indoor service robots, those that are able to operate in environments populated with humans, and especially those that are able to interact with the humans have gained high interest in recent years.

He said typical services of these robots include pick-up and delivery of meals and transport of medical records and specimen between rooms in a hotel or a hospital.

Also these service robots are used to automate repetitive works such as transport goods inside a building and to operate in highly hazardous environments like nuclear plants or underground mines.

Unlike other robots assigned to do similar tasks, this robot uses the grid pattern on the tiled floor of the office to build the map of its environment.

Locations that the robot has to move can be given in terms of coordinates or the operator can teach the robot using navigation keys. The robot will avoid any obstacles on its path while in motion without missing its destination.

This robot also can be used as the platform for more complicated research work. He believes that in the near future service robots of this kind will be working in offices, domestic environments, factories and other similar places in Sri Lanka also. User friendliness, stability and light weight are the key features of Kulatunga's robot.

Future plan

Ranjan's next target is to give some intelligence to his robot and thereby increase the autonomy of his robot. He likes to thank all his supervisors, lecturers and the University for giving him the opportunity to work on this research.