Using radio waves to track wildlife
Anastasia Lavrenko is an expert in radio systems – by which you should not imagine just the radio in your car. Her research focuses on using radio waves for sensing, monitoring and tracking the most unusual things, such as insects.
Anastasia Lavrenko, Assistant Professor at the Radio Systems group at the University of Twente, has a background in radio systems engineering. ‘Radio systems use electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency range to transmit information, or sense the environment. Radio waves are all around you! You can’t see or touch them, but they allow you to communicate with others, listen to music and watch videos without any cables,’ explains the scientist. ‘It’s almost magic!’
While transmitting information is the traditional application of radio waves, Lavrenko is excited about more novel uses of the technology. ‘Development and research in radio systems is not only about packing more and more data in the same frequency anymore. There has been an expansion of new applications – including different types of localization, sensing and navigation.’ Using wireless systems to solve sensing and localization problems is precisely Lavrenko’s field of expertise.
The scientist was recently awarded the VENI grant and will use the funding for unique research into sensing, monitoring and tracking of very small wildlife by using radio waves. ‘When I say small wildlife, I mean very small – my project is focused on tracking insects, such as beetles and bees,’ clarifies Lavrenko. ‘Studying these animals is very difficult, because they are so small. You can’t attach a tracker to a bee, like you might do with larger animals. That is why I’m looking into using very tiny tags that attach themselves to the insects and use energy from radio signals. It is what we call an active sensing system, meaning we have to put a tag on the insect to make sure it produces a signal that separates it from everything else around.’
This approach could solve a problem that currently has no other solution, stresses the researcher. ‘I became involved in this line of research as a postdoc in New Zealand, where I learned about this challenge working together with entomologists. The variety of insects is enormous. Greater than any other species on the planet. But we don’t know much about the majority of them, because they are so difficult to track. This technology could potentially solve this problem for many types of animals,’ says Lavrenko. ‘I love that this application is really out of the ordinary. It’s not something you might normally think of but it is connected to a real problem that is fundamentally unsolved at the moment. It’s not about making something faster or stronger, it’s about creating something from scratch.’
Education
Anastasia Lavrenko is passionate about training next generations of electrical, and particularly radio, engineers. ‘I think my interest in education comes from my grandfather who was a university lecturer his entire life,’ she says. ‘He was so dedicated and so loved by his students. He was strict but fair and he really cared. That is who I strive to be as a teacher. The most important thing I learnt is that it’s okay to not know everything. Teaching is about learning, not only about passing on knowledge. Knowledge is easy to access nowadays with Google at our fingertips. The main lesson you need to learn is how to recognize problems and how to search for solutions.’
In her position at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS), Lavrenko designed a brand-new Master course ‘Wireless communication systems’. ‘I’m very proud of this course. It allowed me to think about the educational process and what is the best way to teach. Designing education is very hard, especially with all the new technology that is constantly popping up. That is why you really need to think about what are the core skills that you need to provide to your students.’
About Anastasia Lavrenko
Anastasia Lavrenko is an Assistant Professor at the Radio Systems group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Twente. Her background is in radio systems engineering and her research focus is on signal processing and algorithm development for wireless systems, particularly applied to sensing and localization problems.
Lavrenko acquired her PhD in Electrical Engineering (signal theory) at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Her PhD thesis on sub-Nyquist sampling of sparse analog signals was awarded best doctoral thesis of 2019. Before joining the University of Twente, she spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Scion (New Zealand Forest Research Institute) and the Wireless Research Centre at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. In 2022 she received the VENI grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Press photos
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