Lukas Vacek

University of Pennsylvania

Biography

Lukas was born in Czech Republic, raised in Japan and Hong Kong, studied in Philadelphia and worked on four different continents, making him a true global citizen. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Computer Science with a Math minor from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a degree in Finance from the Wharton School of Business.

Lukas worked as a robotics researcher at Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab, developing guidance, navigation and control systems for UAVs. His work resulted in multiple published papers and a patent. Lukas also got to deep-dive into machine learning at Amazon Alexa, where he developed software for the Echo Show and Echo Look.

From 2017 to 2020, Lukas worked as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, serving clients in North America, Europe, South East Asia and the Caribbean across a wide range of industries. Lukas specialized in strategy, corporate finance, private equity and large-scale, rapid corporate transformations projects.

In 2020, Lukas left the Firm to return to the world of technology, work on a startup and pursue graduate education. During COVID-19, he quickly adapted by moving to Bermuda and used his engineering and business background to advise private equity firms and their portfolio companies. Partnering with top management consulting firms, he consulted on ~30 projects, including in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. During this time, he developed a novel quantitative geospatial analysis technique that helps companies assess which new markets to expand into and using which growth strategy.

In 2023, Lukas enrolled in The University of Hong Kong’s Juris Doctor program and in 2025 was accepted into the dual-degree LLM program at Penn Carey Law. In his free time, Lukas likes to fly planes (real ones & radio-controlled), sail and ski.

Download my resumé.

Interests

Aerospace & aviation
Aerial robotics
Artificial intelligence & machine learning
Finance
Corporate distress & turnaround

Education

Master of Laws (LLM), In progress

Penn Carey Law School, University of Pennsylvania
Juris Doctor (JD), In progress

Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Bachelor of Science in Economics (Finance), 2017

Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
Bachelor of Science in Engineering (Comp. Science), 2017

School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

Experience

May not be exhaustive, for most recent work experience please contact me.

Director

Zoomba Limited

Mar 2021 – Present

Successfully led ~30 consulting projects; usually run in collaboration with other consulting firms (incl. MBB)
Industry focus on private equity funds and their portfolio companies (strong exposure to healthcare and biotech)
Scope of consulting projects included: assessing market size, competitive dynamics & landscape, growth strategy, potential operational improvements and product segmentation & differentiation

Engagement Manager

McKinsey & Company

Aug 2017 – Apr 2020 San Francisco, California

Specialized in strategy, corporate finance, private equity and large-scale, rapid corporate transformations
Ran projects with both large-cap and small-cap companies across the entire globe, in both developed & developing regions, including: United States, Europe, South East Asia & the Caribbean

Sample projects include:

Multiple commercial, vendor and operational due diligences to assess market size, dynamics, competitive landscape and operational improvements across various industries, such as: electronic table games, advanced industries, healthcare, high tech, government services, automotive, travel and chemicals
Created a ‘future of mobility’ vision for supersonic air travel, including how this futuristic market could work
Identified a financial distress scenario in a public company, resulting in an immediate, rapid transformation
Improved working capital and reduced SG&A costs for a public company as part of a broad transformation
Built strategy for supermajor O&G company to expand into renewable energy
Developed a strategic response for a state-run health insurance company to deal with the launch of universal healthcare in a developing country
Optimized supply chain & manufacturing operations for a major semi-conductor manufacturer
Designed the financial restructuring of a Caribbean-based company suffering from long-term unprofitability
Created a go-to-market & competitive response strategy for a major payments company

Summer Software Development Engineer

Amazon Alexa

May 2016 – Jul 2016 Boston, Massachusetts

Developed software for Amazon Alexa. My focus was on data ingestion & gathering to help collect ground truth data on new, prototype devices for the machine learning platform.

Researcher

GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania

Apr 2016 – May 2017 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Designed guidance, navigation and control (GNC) algorithms for indoor and outdoor use on aerial robots, including path planning, computer vision (mono and stereo camera), object deployment and recovery, and mission control
Developed fully-integrated software and hardware for aerial robotic applications in agriculture, such as leaf sample collection or mosquito trap deployment and recovery for in-situ analysis (patent pending)
Contributed to the OpenUAV project (openuav.us) to create an open-source, easy-to-use UAV hardware and software platform for research and academic use
Published and/or presented papers at multiple conferences, including: ICUAS 2017, ACM/IEEE 2018
Helped create the inaugural NSF CPS-VO competition sponsored by the National Science Foundation
Lead the team that won 1st place at the NSF CPS-VO competition in October 2016

Process Optimization & Management / Data Privacy & Protection

MasterCard

Jul 2015 – Jan 2016 Purchase, New York

Optimized business processes in the legal & franchise integrity department and helped develop policies for data privacy to ensure anonimity.

President & Founder

Penn Aerial Robotics (non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania)

Jan 2014 – May 2017 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Created the club vision, structure and organization. Organized projects and lead competitions for the club.
At the time of founding was Penn’s 2nd competitive engineering club (after Penn Electric Racing)
1st Place: NSF CPS-VO Competition, October 2016
18th place (out of 138 entries): AIAA Design-Build-Fly Initial Proposal, October 2016 (competition in April 2017)
Best Technical Paper Award: International Aerial Robotics Competition, August 2016

Teaching Assistant (CIS 120)

University of Pennsylvania

Jan 2014 – Dec 2014 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Taught “Introduction to Computer Science”, including leading recitations, grading homework and helping students during office hours.

Sailing Instructor

Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club

Sep 2009 – May 2013 Hong Kong SAR

Taught sailing in Hong Kong as a RYA-certified instructor.

Featured publications

sUAS for Deployment and Recovery of an Environmental Sensor Probe

Lukas Vacek, Edward Atter, Pedro Rizo, Brian Nam, Ryan Kortvelesy, Delaney Kaufman, Jnaneshwar Das, Vijay Kumar

June 2017 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)

sUAS for Deployment and Recovery of an Environmental Sensor Probe

This paper describes the solution proposed by Penn Aerial Robotics and GRASP Lab from the University of Pennsylvania at the 2016 NSF Student UAV challenge. The paper proposes a solution for the autonomous deployment and retrieval of mosquito traps in the field. These mosquito traps are used to collect mosquito samples and aid research in dangerous diseases such as yellow fever and dengue fever. Our proposed solution provides a fully autonomous mechanism for completing this mission. The major challenges encountered include detecting and docking with the trap in different outdoor lighting conditions.

OpenUAV: A UAV Testbed for the CPS and Robotics Community

Matt Schmittle, Anna Lukina, Lukas Vacek, Jnaneshwar Das, Christopher P Buskirk, Stephen Rees, Janos Sztipanovits, Radu Grosu, Vijay Kumar

January 2018 2018 ACM/IEEE 9th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS)

OpenUAV: A UAV Testbed for the CPS and Robotics Community

Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have grown in popularity for research and education, overcoming challenges associated with fixed wing and ground robots. Unfortunately, extensive physical testing can be expensive and time consuming because of short flight times due to battery constraints and safety precautions. Simulation tools offer a low barrier to entry and enable testing and validation before field trials. However, most of the well-known simulators today have a high barrier to entry due to the need for powerful computers and the time required for initial set up. In this paper, we present OpenUAV, an open source test bed for UAV education and research that overcomes these barriers. We leverage the Containers as a Service (CaaS) technology to enable students and researchers carry out simulations on the cloud. We have based our framework on open-source tools including ROS, Gazebo, Docker, PX4, and Ansible, we designed the simulation framework so that it has no special hardware requirements. Two use-cases are presented. First, we show how a UAV can navigate around obstacles, and second, we test a multi-UAV swarm formation algorithm. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source, cloud-enabled testbed for UAVs.

All publications

Daniel Orol, Lukas Vacek, Delaney Vanessa Kaufman, Jnaneshwar Das, Vijay Kumar (2023). Systems, devices, and methods for agricultural sample collection. US Patent US11609159B2.

Cite PDF

Matt Schmittle, Anna Lukina, Lukas Vacek, Jnaneshwar Das, Christopher P Buskirk, Stephen Rees, Janos Sztipanovits, Radu Grosu, Vijay Kumar (2018). OpenUAV: A UAV Testbed for the CPS and Robotics Community. 2018 ACM/IEEE 9th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS).

Cite Source PDF Code Website

Lukas Vacek, Edward Atter, Pedro Rizo, Brian Nam, Ryan Kortvelesy, Delaney Kaufman, Jnaneshwar Das, Vijay Kumar (2017). sUAS for Deployment and Recovery of an Environmental Sensor Probe. 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS).

Cite Source PDF Slides

Daniel Orol, Jnaneshwar Das, Lukas Vacek, Isabella Orr, Mathews Paret, Camillo J Taylor, Vijay Kumar (2017). An aerial phytobiopsy system: Design, evaluation, and lessons learned. 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS).

Cite Source PDF Video

Lukas Vacek, Benjamin Kramer (2016). Development of an Aerial Robot for Flying in Confined Spaces and Interacting with Ground Robots. 2016 International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC).

Cite PDF Slides Video