Automation and robotics in post disaster waste management: Post Tsunami Sri Lanka

In recent years, automation and robots have been applied at different domains to coordinate collaborative behavior in distributed systems and providing a powerful basis for proactive applications of complex nature, specially in large scale disasters requiring complex tasks to be performed by groups under extreme time and resource constraints. Sri Lanka is still suffering from effects of December 2004 Tsunami disaster. Waste and debris becomes a key issue. Therefore, it is important to explore avenues to optimize post disaster waste management through automation and robotics. Thus, this paper aims to provide a critical review on automation and robotics applications at a post disaster scenario. Comprehensive literature review, documentary survey and field survey are adopted as methods of data collection. Survey revealed capacity constraints of expertise, funds and cultural issues as main challenges. Finally, the paper provides new avenues for effective utilization of automation and robotics through mapping of best practices.