The UPTC was founded in 1953. It is an autonomous university entity, of national nature, public, democratic, with a special regime, linked to the Ministry of National Education of Colombia regarding policies and planning in the sector educational, with sectional headquarters in Tunja, Duitama, Sogamoso and Chiquinquirá. At this moment, the university has more than 33,000 students. The Engineering Faculty of the UPTC Sogamoso, has an infrastructure around 24,687 m2, having the facility labs 2,660 m2. The Electronics School program has four postgraduate programs, including a master in Engineering, and a doctorate in Engineering. The faculty has three research groups on electronics field, GIRA work robotics and industrial automatization, the two other group research in digital signal processing (DSP-UPTC) and telecommunications (GINTEL) applied transversally to our interest focus: agro-industrial process, mining, environment and engineering in education. The GINTEL group researches on radio-frequency amplifiers, transmission lines and propagation models, also, mobile, and wireless communications.
The telecommunications laboratory of the UPTC has four senior, two young and two junior researchers accredited in the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry (Minciencias). Our main research focuses are the design of high power and bandwidth amplifiers for wireless communication standards. Signal propagation modelling to estimate the propagation coefficient in indoor, outdoor and confined environments (tunnels in mining). Besides, we design digital electronics in embedded systems: microprocessors, microcontrollers, field programable gate-array (FPGA) or System on a Chip (SoC), and apply digital signal processing in communications to mitigate nonlinear distortions using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. We have some lab facilities including digital high-speed oscilloscopes, radio-frequency spectrum and vector network analyzers up to 28 GHz, signal source generators and analysers. Also, the lab has a portable kit for propagation and antenna measurement for vehicular communications and outdoor environment characterization scenarios. The GIRA group has a patent of a Portable Triaxial Accelerograph for recording seismic signal events.
As a researcher, the professor Avendaño has participated in the FiWin5G project supporting the CNIT with a low-cost CRAN backhauling for 5G networks. On the DSP for the CLARIFIER project, he will support the analysis of the requirements and technical specifications of the system, to study the digital prototyping platform to implement and test the data sensor fusion algorithms such us Kalman filtering, particle filter algorithm and machine learning approaches to build the image of target detected/tracked.
Role in CLARIFIER:
The UPTC team will be involved in CLARFIFIER activities related with WP2-WP6 activities, participating in the analysis of the requirements and specifications for propose the system design. Also, focused on the study, analysis, selection, implementation and validation of algorithms (conventional and based machine learning) for the DSP unit to build the image from the laser scanning (LiDAR sensor). They will explore different state-of-the-art algorithms from the artificial intelligence pool to identify which is the most suitable to attain the best system performance from point data cloud.