Viraj Muthugala

Singapore University of Technology and Design · Engineering Product Development Pillar

Assistive robots have been developed to improve the living standards of older people. These assistive robots are intended to be operated by non-expert users. Hence, they should have the ability to interact with humans in a human-friendly manner. Humans prefer to use voice instructions, responses, and suggestions in their daily interactions. Such vo...

Cleaning robots are used to cater to the demands in both domestic and industrial premises. Much of research work is being conducted to improve functionalities and efficiency of cleaning robots. Users of these robots prefer human-friendly interactive features in these functional robots. Therefore, the focus of the research work in the area of cleani...

Regular Ship hull maintenance is an essential for sustainability. The maintenance work of ship hulls that involve human labor suffers from many shortcomings. Maintenance robots have been introduced for drydocks to eliminate these shortcomings. An energy-efficient Complete Coverage Path Planning (CCPP) is a crucial requirement from a ship hull maint...

Floor‐cleaning robots play a crucial role in both industrial and domestic spaces. However, these robots often face challenges due to hazardous components in their environment, which can cause them to fail and prevent them from performing at their best. This situation necessitates continuous research in the field of floor‐cleaning robots. However, m...

Cleaning is a fundamental routine task in human life that is now handed over to leading-edge technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence. Various floor-cleaning robots have been developed with different cleaning functionalities, such as vacuuming and scrubbing. However, failures can occur when a robot tries to clean an incompatible di...

An emerging trend in utilizing service robots in a vast range of application areas could be seen nowadays as a promising effort to uplift the living standard. These service robots are intended to be used by non-expert users, and their service tasks often require navigation in human-populated environments. Thus, human-friendly navigation behavior is...

Robot-aided cleaning auditing is pioneering research that uses autonomous robots to assess a region’s cleanliness level by analyzing the dirt samples collected from various locations. Since the dirt sample gathering process is more challenging, adapting a coverage planning strategy from a similar domain for cleaning is non-viable. Alternatively, a...

Service robots with social interactive features are developed to cater to the demand in various application domains. These robots often need to approach toward users to accomplish typical day-to-day services. Thereby, the approaching behavior of a service robot is a crucial factor in developing social interactivity between users and the robot. In t...

Emerging technologies and robotics solutions for cleaning applications are rapidly progressing nowadays. Reconfigurable robots that can change shapes are introduced to overcome the limitations of fixed-shape robots. Reconfigurable robots should be capable of moving through narrow spaces with the help of continuous shape-changing to improve the cove...

Mobile robots are deployed in the built environment at increasing rates. However, lack of considerations for a robot-inclusive planning has led to physical spaces that would potentially pose hazards to robots, and contribute to an overall productivity decline for mobile service robots. This research proposes the use of an adapted Failure Mode and E...

False ceilings are often utilised in residential and commercial spaces as a way to contain and conceal necessary but unattractive building infrastructure, including mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services. Concealing such elements has made it difficult to perform periodic inspection safely for maintenance. To complement this, there have been...

Multistorey buildings are rapidly constructing with the current world development. Cleaning of these buildings is a major concern due to several issues such as scarcity of labor. Cleaning robots are developed to cope with these issues. Among these cleaning robots, staircase cleaning robots play a vital role in a multistorey building. Therefore, thi...

During a viral outbreak, such as COVID-19, autonomously operated robots are in high demand. Robots effectively improve the environmental concerns of contaminated surfaces in public spaces, such as airports, public transport areas and hospitals, that are considered high-risk areas. Indoor spaces walls made up most of the indoor areas in these public...

Frequent inspections are essential for drains to maintain proper function to ensure public health and safety. Robots have been developed to aid the drain inspection process. However, existing robots designed for drain inspection require improvements in their design and autonomy. This paper proposes a novel design of a drain inspection robot named R...

Area coverage is a crucial factor for a robot intended for applications such as floor cleaning, disinfection, and inspection. Robots with fixed shapes could not realize an adequate level of area coverage performance. Reconfigurable robots have been introduced to overcome the limitations of fixed-shape robots, such as accessing narrow spaces and cov...

Frequent inspections are essential for false ceilings to maintain the service infrastructures, such as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, and the structure of false ceilings. Human-labor-based conventional inspection procedures for false ceilings suffer many shortcomings, including safety concerns. Thus, robot-aided solutions are demanded for fa...

This paper proposes a novel method based on Fuzzy Logic Systems (FLSs) optimized to maximize the area coverage of a tiling robot by reconfiguring per an obstacle considering the “Infi” concept. The consideration of an infinite number of reconfigurable shapes by a tiling robot is defined as the “Infi” concept. The major advantage of the proposed met...

The inspection and maintenance of drains with varying heights necessitates a drain mapping robot with trained labour to maintain community hygiene and prevent the spread of diseases. For adapting to level changes and navigating in the narrow confined environments of drains, we developed a self-configurable hybrid robot, named Tarantula-II. The plat...

Vertical gardens have emerged alongside the increase in urban density and land scarcity to reintegrate greenery in the built environment. Existing maintenance for vertical gardens is labour-intensive, time-consuming and is being increasingly complemented by robotic applications. While research has been focused on enhancing robot design to improve p...

Buildings are constructed for accommodating living and industrial needs. Floor cleaning robots have been developed to cater to the demand of these buildings. Area coverage and coverage time are crucial performance factors of a floor cleaning robot. Reconfigurable tiling robots have been introduced over fixed shape robots to improve area coverage in...

Complete area coverage is a crucial factor for a floor cleaning robot. Self-reconfigurable tiling robots have been introduced over robots with a fixed shape for floor cleaning since they improve the area coverage by the flexibility of shape-shifting in cluttered environments. The existing coverage methods of reconfigurable tiling robots follow the...

Routine cleaning of the corroded ship hulls in dry dock maintenance guarantees the smooth operation of the shipping industry. Deploying the autonomous system to remove the corrosion by water-blasting is a feasible approach to ease the burden in manual operation and to reduce water, time, and energy consumption. In this paper, the water-blasting fra...

The operation of a ship in the ocean depends crucially on the quality of routine offshore dry dock maintenance. Automation by robotics is an efficient solution to address the issues of saving water, energy, time, and easing the labour workload when conducting hydro-blasting ship hulls in the dry dock maintenance industry. In this paper, the automat...

Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, whose transmission can lead to global pandemics like COVID-19. Contact with contaminated surfaces or objects is one of the major channels of spreading infectious diseases among the community. Therefore, the typical contaminable surfaces, such as walls and handrails, should often be cleane...

The role of mobile robots for cleaning and sanitation purposes is increasing worldwide. Disinfection and hygiene are two integral parts of any safe indoor environment, and these factors become more critical in COVID-19-like pandemic situations. Door handles are highly sensitive contact points that are prone to be contamination. Automation of the do...

Regular dry dock maintenance work on ship hulls is essential for maintaining the efficiency and sustainability of the shipping industry. Hydro blasting is one of the major processes of dry dock maintenance work, where human labor is extensively used. The conventional methods of maintenance work suffer from many shortcomings, and hence robotized sol...

Human-friendly interactive features are preferred for service robots used in emerging areas of robotic applications such as caretaking, health care, assistance, education and entertainment since they are intended to be operated by non-expert users. Humans prefer to use voice instructions, responses, and suggestions in their daily interactions. Such...

This work is inspired by motion control of cleaning robots, operating in certain endogenous environments, and performing various tasks like door cleaning, wall sanitizing, etc. The base platform’s motion for these robots is generally similar to the motion of four-wheel cars. Most of the cleaning and maintenance tasks require detection, path plannin...

Floor cleaning robots have been developed to cope with the issues arisen with conventional cleaning methods that involve extensive human labor. hTetro is a self-reconfigurable floor cleaning robot that has been introduced to improve area coverage. Polyomino tiling theory is utilized by hTetro to plan area coverage. Energy usage and area coverage ar...

The development of floor cleaning robots is an emerging area in robotics. Maximizing the area coverage is a foremost mission for a floor cleaning robot. Reconfigurable floor cleaning robots outperform floor cleaning robots with fixed morphology in the aspect of area coverage. A reconfigurable robot should be more flexible in changing its morphologi...

Wall cleaning robots are developed to cater to the demands of the building maintenance sector. The ability to climb vertical surfaces is one of the crucial requirements of a wall cleaning robot. Robots that can climb vertical surfaces by adhesion to a surface are preferred since those do not require additional support structures. Vacuum suction mec...

Assistive robots are developed for supporting daily activities of elderly people to uplift the living standards. The assistive robots should be friendly, reliable, active, and comprehensible in order to satisfy the needs of elderly population. Human activities are frequently related to navigational tasks and human tend to use descriptions which inc...

Intelligent service robots are being developed for emerging areas of robotics applications. Human-friendly interactive features are preferred for these service robots since these robots are anticipated to be operated by non-experts. Humans prefer to use voice instructions for exchanging the ideas between peers. Such voice instructions often include...

Development of intelligent service robots is a growing research area within the field of robotics. Users of these service robots expect human-like interaction abilities from the robots. These service robots must be capable of navigating in human populated environments by considering the comfort of the people for having smooth interaction with the u...

Assistive robots are developed to uplift living standards of human being. Assistive robot need to be friendly, reliable, and understandable in order to be better human like companion. Robot should be able to understand the user effectively and robot should be able to expand its knowledge based on experience gain from activities or conversations. Th...

Intelligent service robots are used at a significant level to uplift the living standards of domestic users. These robots are expected to possess human-friendly interactive features. Service robots should be able to provide a variety of tasks to support independent living of users in domestic environments. Therefore, a service robot often needs to...

Robots are becoming a part of the human society. They are intended to maintain long-term social interactions with humans. A memory about each interaction partner is essential for a robot for maintaining long-term social interactions. Therefore, robot memory must possess the abilities for extracting, storing, updating and recalling information durin...

Service robots have been developed to enhance the living standard of people. Users of these service robots are not experts in robotic domain. Hence, they prefer to have human-friendly features in these service robots. These service robots often need to navigate toward their users when accomplishing service tasks demanded by the users. Therefore, th...

Service robots have become a widely used tool in human-friendly assistive tasks in many aspects including social environments. Maintaining a sustainable interaction with humans is essential in performing assistive tasks in this regard. Therefore, a robot must be equipped with intelligent cognitive skills in decision making as well as in making frie...

An intelligent service robot is a machine that is able to gather information from the environment and use its knowledge to operate safely in a meaningful and purposive manner. Intelligent service robots are currently being developed to cater to demands in emerging areas of robotic applications such as caretaking and assistance, healthcare and eduta...

Assistive robots are developed for supporting the daily activities of human beings to uplift the living standards. The assistive robots should be friendly, reliable, active, comprehensible and capable of creating interactive conversations with users in order to be a friendly companion for the human. Humans tend to include uncertain terms related to...

Humans prefer to use voice commands to guide their peer companions in daily assistive tasks. In human perspective, they expect same behavior from assistive robot companions as well. The paper presents an approach towards using such voice instructions based on uncertain and qualitative information to describe object placements. Consider a case in wh...

Intelligent service robots are currently being developed to cater to demands in emerging areas of robotic applications, ranging from entertainment to health care. These service robots are intended to be operated by non-expert users, and their service tasks involve direct interaction between these robots and their human users. Thus, human-friendly i...

Human-friendly interactive features are preferred for domestic service robots. Humans prefer to use verbal communication in order to convey instructions to peers. Those voice instructions often include uncertain terms such as “little” and “far”. Therefore, the ability to quantify such information is mandatory for human-friendly service robots. The...

A green roof is a roof of a building that is covered from a vegetation. Green roofs are beneficial in number of ways for buildings. Crops in green roofs are exposed to direct solar radiation and strong winds. Furthermore, the substrate is shallow and it can hold limited amount of water. Therefore, artificial irrigation methods are required especial...

Service robots are being developed as a supportive aid for elderly people. Those robots are operated by non-expert users in heterogeneous domestic environments. Hence, the ability of a robot to be operated in a more natural human friendly manner enhances the overall satisfaction of the user. Humans prefer to use voice in order to convey instruction...

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions and intentions to non-human entities. Nowadays, development of anthropomorphic features in robotic heads is a major area of interest in the field of robotics. Many robotics heads with anthropomorphic features are developed to improve the social interaction between robots and humans. Howe...

This paper presents about an intelligent service robot named Moratuwa Intelligent Robot (MIRob) that can acquire knowledge through interactive discussion with the user while handling the uncertain information in the user instructions. In order to facilitate this behavior, a finite state intention module has been introduced to manage the interaction...