Guidance, Navigation and Control

I’m Eli Lewis, an Aerospace Engineer.

I am a senior in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on advancing guidance, navigation, and control algorithms to shape the future of space exploration.

LinkedIn Resume [email protected]

Projects and Experiences

Collection of some of the various projects and experiences that I have worked on over the past few years.

CAD render of the rocket tail section: fin can, main fins, motor mount, and the actuated tabs at the fin trailing edges.

Rocket Roll Control

Active roll control for a high-power rocket at Liquid Rocketry at Illinois. CFD-derived control authority, surface sizing, and a rate-damping loop running on an onboard state estimate.

Standing outside the entrance of Draper's Cambridge headquarters.

Draper GNC Co-op

Six months as a guidance, navigation, and control engineer at Draper. I worked on GNC design for a novel vehicle, trajectory optimization, and on a 6-DOF simulation framework.

Heatmap of checksum error over a 2D input domain: a blue low-error island over the in-distribution region, rising to red out of distribution.

Machine Learning Checksums

A soft checksum lets a regression surrogate flag its own out-of-distribution inputs from a single extra output node, no ensemble required. On a 0-D combustion dataset it separates in-distribution from out-of-distribution predictions at 99.66% AUROC.

Two panels showing a baseball trajectory bending down onto a target and a catcher's view of the pitch crossing inside the strike zone.

Guided Baseball

A closed-loop 6-DOF GNC stack that steers a pitched baseball into the strike zone using Magnus force alone. One IMU, three reaction wheels, an 11-state EKF, a closed-form kinematic guidance law, and a Monte Carlo campaign that takes the strike rate from 25% to 100%.

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In progress (Project Based Course)

Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations