Raunaq Bhirangi

About Me

Hi there! I am Raunaq and I am a fourth-year PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Abhinav Gupta and Carmel Majidi. I am also a Visiting Researcher at Meta AI, where I collaborate with Tess Hellebrekers. I also collaborate with Prof. Lerrel Pinto at NYU. I am broadly interested in building robots capable of complex control in unstructured environments.

Before I started my PhD, I got a master's degree in Robotics working at the Biorobotics Lab at CMU under the guidance of Howie Choset and Matthew Travers, working on legged and modular robots. Adding to the list of academic labs, I have also spent two wonderful summers at the Multiscale Robotics Automation Lab at Purdue University and the Acoustics and Dynamics Lab at Ohio State University.

A lifetime ago, I spent 4 years as an undergrad at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay dabbling in debate, robotics and a ton of dynamics classes.

Connect with me over email at rbhirang [at] cs [dot] cmu [dot] edu!

Scholar

Github

Research

Robotics is the most interdisciplinary of fields, and I believe that bringing robots into the unstructured, everyday world of homes and offices requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire stack. In training to be a full-stack roboticist, I'm currently focused on ReSkin, a soft magnetic skin capable of large area tactile sensing. My work encompasses sensor design and development, ML models that generalize across sensors, and ongoing efforts on integrating vision and tactile feedback for closed-loop robot interaction.