School: Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnología - UTEC

Country: Peru

Currently : Designing I&E initiatives for students on campus

I belong to the UIF Family since 2017

Contact me about: Making awareness workshops for your campus, building culture in your leadership circle, discussions about robotics (really love it!), and anything related to making the world a better place.

E-mail: elmer.escandontufino@gmail.com

Phone: +51 943 186 710

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elmerescandontufino/

Raul (Elmer) Escandon is a senior Electronics Engineering student at Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnologia - UTEC in Lima, Peru. He is actively enrolled in his two passion activities during college: Innovation, Robotics, Human-Machine Interaction, and Hardware Design.

As a University Innovation Fellow, Raul design I&E activities for the SpinOut I&E community. This community aims to develop creative confidence for UTEC students. From 2016, SpinOut UTEC has raised the I&E career of 80 students, and its members have developed 13 initiatives.

In SpinOut UTEC, I've participated in creating a pre-incubation program called "How might we start a startup?" with our university accelerator UTEC Ventures. The HMW program teaches students to understand their users, identify problems, and develop the mindsets to begin the entrepreneurial journey. After two years, the program impacted 70+ UTEC students (included the first UTEC startup made only by students: http://luteach.com) and 50+ students from other universities. Also, I have co-designed three awareness workshops: Moonshot Thinking, Virtual Design Thinking, and Aprendiendo con SpinOut. These workshops focused on promoting the importance of innovation in students' life and career. So far, you have noticed I really believe in the power of awareness in freshmen students, they are the ones that needed it the most! Eventually, I've also designed and facilitated more than 5+ workshops in other universities, companies and Government organizations in Peru (some examples are: Universidad Nacional Jorge Basadre Grohman, Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, Universidad Científica del Sur, Univerisdad Privada del Norte, companies like Nexa and Entel and organizations as Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima and Municipalidad de Barranco). Currently, I am working on designing study material for courses in my major while finisihing my Thesis. Nonetheless, check out the current work of SpinOut UTEC and our UIF UTEC family, they are really making some progress in I&E on campus.

As an electronics engineering student, I've participated in robotics projects since his first year. First, he wrote an academic paper about an educational approach for teaching freshmen students to develop artificial intelligence games for a Delta Robot, this paper was presented on IEEE INTERCON 2018 in Lima. Then, he participated in the creation of two low-cost animal-inspired robots which unfortunately did not succeed due to the lack of resources and team capabilities. However, since failure is part of the process and success the consequences of learning, he participated as an embedded programer and leader in the Capstone project between Purdue University and UTEC, this project aims to create collaborative wheeled robots for beach cleaning in Peru. The team accomplished to build a plastic bottle collector robot from scratch in four months, this robot has full closed-loop control and sensor fusion for localization, moreover the teams is currently working on providing semi-autonomous capabilities using computer vision algorithms. Since I wanted to explore other areas of expertise related to Electronics, I have worked as Research Assistant in the Embedded Systems Laboratory as part of a heritage conservation project, evaluating if certain pieces are highly affected by climate conditions. On the other side, I've broadly researched the areas of Signals systems looking for new algorithms to detect arm movements using signals from our nerves, these projects have helped to detect fatigue conditions for rehabilitation procedures and the implementation of more accurate prosthetic arms!

I am so excited to combine my two passions, one taste of it was the designing of three robotics workshops for K-12 students and Open Day activities. Also, I am currently working on wearable devices to help physical therapists to acquire more information about their patients progress during their activities.

If you have any questions regarding robotics, signals, embedded electronics and I&E, reach me without any hesitation! I'm open and grateful to bring you a piece of advice and knowledge!