I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Candidate working on the AIGreenBots EU project at the Georgia Tech–CNRS International Research Lab IRL2958 (DREAM Lab), France. I’m advised by Stéphanie Aravecchia and Cédric Pradalier. My research interests are in probabilistic models, Sim2Real and policy learning for robotic task and motion planning.

I obtained my master’s degree in mobile sensing and robotics at the University of Bonn, Germany. My master’s thesis was advised by Marija Popović and Cyrill Stachniss. Before moving to Germany, I was a master’s student at IIT Delhi, India for a short while, where I worked on model predictive control with S.K. Saha. I studied electrical engineering at SRMIST, India.

Previously, I interned with the Embodied AI team at the Huawei Munich Research Labs under Carlos Carbone on RL and robotics simulation. Before grad school, I was working in the robotics VC sector as a founding employee at IHFC. Here, I helped deploy $6M into robotics startups and professor-led research projects. I performed research and technical diligence, evaluating TRLs and assessing commercialization potential of prospective ventures.

Selected Research

🏆 Best Applied Contribution Award at ICRA 2026 Workshop on Agricultural Robotics

AgriGen: Large-Scale Scene Generation Framework for Photorealistic Agricultural Robotics Simulation

Utkarsh Bajpai, Serge Tlejji, Cédric Pradalier, Stéphanie Aravecchia

Workshop on Agricultural Robotics
International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) 2026

Project Page

Large scale scene generation framework for agricultural robotics simulation.

Uncertainty-Informed Active Perception for Open Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation

Utkarsh Bajpai, Julius Rückin, Cyrill Stachniss, Marija Popović

European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR) 2025

Paper Code

Exploiting prompt uncertainty of Vision Language Models to informatively search for objects in indoor scenes.

🏆 Best in Technical Design Award at AUVSI SUAS 2019

Orca: Autonomous Fixed Wing Delivery Drone

Team SRMUAV (Utkarsh Bajpai : Team Leader)

AUVSI Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) Competition, 2019

Paper Blog Video

An autonomous UAV for flight, obstacle avoidance, imagery, and air delivery, built from the ground-up at SRMUAV.

Awards

2026, Best Applied Contribution award at the Workshop for Agricultural Robotics at ICRA 2026 for AgriGen.
2025, Naver Labs Europe travel grant for poster presentation at the Naver AI for Robotics workshop.
2025, Phenorob M.Sc Conference Grant for my ECMR 2025 paper.
2025, Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship for my doctoral research on the AIGreenBots EU project.
2022, Selected (11% acceptance rate) with full financial aid to the ETH Robotics Summer School.
2019, Winner of the Mathworks Minidrone competition at IROS 2019.
2019, Best in Technical Design award at AUVSI SUAS 2019.

Academic Services

Journal Reviewer: IEEE R-AL, IEEE T-ITS
Conference Reviewer: ICRA, IROS

Misc

I like drinking tea from all over the world.
I like listening to, playing and programming musical instruments.