Abhishek Pai

✈️

Abhishek Pai

Graduate Student

University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

About me!

Graduate student at UIUC pursuing Aerospace Engineering with a focus on autonomy, learning and control. Extensive experience in UAS design, development, and autonomy. Passionate about expanding expertise and driving impactful innovations.

Interests

Unmanned Systems
Reinforcement Learning
Computer Vision
Control Theory

Education

MS Aerospace Engineering
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering & Computational Mathematics
Manipal Institute of Technology

Featured Projects

Where's My Fruit?

Where's My Fruit?

LiDAR-based SLAM and PID wall-tracking for autonomous exploration on an F1-Tenth vehicle. Integrated real-time object detection with map-based location reporting for precise object localization.

May 14, 2025

Evaluating fine-tuned VLA Models for Robotic Control

Evaluating fine-tuned VLA Models for Robotic Control

(Ongoing work) Investigating failure modes in VLA models fine-tuned with RL using interpretability techniques for robotic manipulation tasks.

May 13, 2025

Genetic Algorithm-Based Wing Design for fixed-wing MAVs

Design Optimization

Genetic Algorithm-Based Wing Design for fixed-wing MAVs

Designed an end-to-end wing optimization pipeline by coupling GAs with VLM simulations for micro-UAVs. Automated aerodynamic sizing and performance evaluation under multiple flight constraints.

May 12, 2025

Safe Landing Zone Detection for UAVs

Computer Vision

Safe Landing Zone Detection for UAVs

Novel approach for safe landing zone detection for UAVs, leveraging DL-based image segmentation with a custom dataset and integrating SuperResolution, resulting in up to 6.3% improvement in accuracy over SOTA methods.

Aug 12, 2023

Featured Publications

A Comparative Study of Aerodynamic Characteristics of Conventional and Multi-lobed Airships

A Comparative Study of Aerodynamic Characteristics of Conventional and Multi-lobed Airships

This study explores the aerodynamic characteristics of conventional and multi-lobed airships, motivated by the growing interest in LTA systems due to advancements in materials science, energy sources, aerodynamics, propulsion technology and control systems.

May 23, 2025

Safe Landing Zone Detection for UAVs using Image Segmentation and Super Resolution

Computer Vision

Safe Landing Zone Detection for UAVs using Image Segmentation and Super Resolution

Novel approach for safe landing zone detection for UAVs, leveraging DL-based image segmentation with a custom dataset and integrating SuperResolution, resulting in up to 6.3% improvement in accuracy over SOTA methods.

Jul 1, 2023

Precise Payload Delivery via Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: An Approach Using Object Detection Algorithms

Computer Vision

Precise Payload Delivery via Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: An Approach Using Object Detection Algorithms

Novel navigation method that improves the accuracy of conventional navigation methods by incorporating a deep-learning-based computer vision approach, achieving a 5 times increase in average horizontal precision over conventional GPS-based approaches.

Feb 19, 2023