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About

Samitha W. Ekanayake is a robotics and autonomous systems researcher whose work has made meaningful contributions to two interconnected domains: swarm robotics and vision-based navigation. He is perhaps best known for his innovative artificial force-based framework for controlling robotic swarms, which introduces a scalable, decentralized algorithm enabling groups of mobile robots to autonomously arrange themselves into predefined geometric formations in two-dimensional space. This foundational work, published across multiple venues between 2007 and 2010, has accumulated nearly 60 citations collectively, reflecting its sustained influence on the multi-robot coordination community. Beyond swarm behavior, Ekanayake has tackled challenging problems in robot perception, particularly stereo-vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). His 2011 paper on robust SLAM with steady and moving landmarks applies modern robust control and estimation theory to address the inherently nonlinear nature of visual measurements — a practically significant advance for real-world robotic deployment. Complementing this, his earlier work on stereo-vision tracking introduced a measurement conversion technique to linearize perspective projection equations, simplifying object tracking for robotic applications. Together, Ekanayake's research portfolio spans formation control, cooperative autonomy, and robust perception, offering valuable tools for researchers designing intelligent, self-organizing robotic systems.