Department of Electrical Engineering congratulates, Dr. Viraj Muthugala, for successful completion of the PhD degree under the supervision of Dr. Buddhika Jayasekara. This is the first PhD of the intelligent service robotics group, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Moratuwa. It is commendable that you have achieved more than typical international level of research outcome in Robotics field with an exceptional list of publications including flagship conferences like IEEE ICRA and IROS. Furthermore, we would like to thank you for the hard work in establishing state of art facilities in service robotics with the funding from SRC Capital grants and guiding the junior students of service robotics group of the Department during last four years.   
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Wu6gMCEAAAAJ&hl=en.
Home page: http://www.virajmuthugala.info/home
 

A research paper titled  ‘’Enhancing Overall Object Placement by Understanding Uncertain Spatial and Qualitative Distance Information in User Commands’’  was presented at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held from May 21-25 in Brisbane, Australia, by Sachi Edirisinghe, a postgraduate research student in the Department of Electrical Engineering . The manuscript was written by Sachi Edirisinghe, Viraj Muthugala and Chapa Sirithunge under the supervision of Dr.  Buddhika Jayasekara.  The authors are from the Intelligent Service Robotics Group- Department of Electrical Engineering and they  are  working  on  the  development  of  Moratuwa  Intelligent  Robot (MIRob),  an  intelligent  service  robot  for domestic environments. 
The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the premiere conference in robotics and automation field and is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. It has the highest H-index in the robotics subject category according to Google Scholar Metrics. The research was funded by a Senate Research Capital Grant (SRC/CAP/2017/03) of University of Moratuwa.
 

Papers entitled “Effect of activity space on detection of human activities by domestic service robots” and “Identification of friendly and deictic gestures in a sequence using upper body skeletal information” were presented at IEEE Tencon 2017- Region 10 flagship conference held on 5-8 November 2017. The papers were presented by Chapa Sirithunge, a masters student supervised by Dr. Buddhika Jayasekara. Arjuna Srimal, an alumni of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Dr. Buddhika Jayasekara and Dr. Chandima Pathirana contributed in this work. They are working on the MIRob platform developed for intelligent service applications. The research was funded by Senate Research Grants SRC/CAP/16/03 and SRC/CAP/17/03.