Radio Systems newsletter - April 2026

This is the tenth edition of our biannual newsletter covering the period from October 2025 until March 2026. The aim is to give an update about recent developments within the Radio Systems group of the University of Twente. 

Besides the already existing educational tasks in quarters 1 and 2 of the 2025-2026 academic year, the Radio Systems group has for the first time taught the Continuous Linear Systems course within Module 5 of the bachelor EE, and the Linear Systems Course for the Premasters. Despite the relatively short time for preparation, the courses were taught successfully and evaluated positively by the students.

In December 2025, the NWO VENI project “Beyond bugging: wireless sensing and monitoring with harmonic radar” had its final user committee meeting which has successfully completed the project. The project delivered novel system designs and comprehensive experimental validations of nonlinear radar concepts, including system-level demonstrations and field trials.  A central innovation was the development of a dual-mode harmonic radar architecture that combines harmonic and intermodulation signal processing within a single system. The development and experimental validation of ultra-lightweight, miniaturised passive tags was another major achievement. The demonstrated ability to track milligram-scale tags in realistic environments represents a significant step forward compared to existing approaches. The project has resulted in 5 journal publications, 11 conference papers, and 1 patent application. As a follow up, a NWO Impact Explorer project “HARNET: harmonic radar for hornet nest tracking and eradication” that has begun in January 2026 evaluates the feasibility of using developed technology for detecting the nests of invasive Asian hornets.

In February 2026, Anastasia Lavrenko together with Jakob Kamminga from the PS group have won the EEMCS Internal Research Voucher for their “MULTIBEE+: Multimodal Sensing for Bumblebee Monitoring” project. Over the summer of 2026, they will explore how radar sensing and AI-based vision can be combined to enable reliable ecological inference of pollinator behaviour.

In March 2026, two Network Wide Events were organized for two EU-Doctoral Network projects that are running within the Radio Systems group. For the NEPIT project (https://nepit.eu/) this event was organized on March 3 to 7, for the SMARTTEST project (https://dn-smarttest.eu/) this was organized on March 23 to 27. During these events, all Doctoral Candidates (DC’s) and most of their supervisors gather together to discuss and share their experiences. The DC’s presented their work so far as well as their plans for the future. Another important aspect of these events is to strengthen the interaction between the DC’s, train their skills and exchange ideas with experts, both from academia and industry.

The ADA-BEAM project has successfully been concluded resulting in 1 dataset published in IEEE DATAPORT, 2 ICC papers, and 2 joint publications (submitted) with UBristol and KU Leuven. The aim of the ADA-BEAM project is to develop adaptive digital beamforming to enable joint communication and multi-task human sensing.

Two 4TU.NIRICT proposals for Community Funding have been (partially) approved: ‘Situation-aware secure beamforming with mixed-resolution phased arrays’ (Yang Miao) and ‘4TU Community on Energy-Efficient Signal Processing and Computing’ (Anastasia Lavrenko).