Hi there! I am Raunaq and I am a postdoctoral researcher with Lerrel Pinto in the CILVR Lab at NYU Courant working at the intersection of . I received my PhD from the Robotics Institute at CMU School of Computer Science, where I was advised by Abhinav Gupta and Carmel Majidi. During my PhD, I was also a Visiting Researcher at Meta AI for two years as part of the Facebook Research & AI Mentorship Program (FRAIM).
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. A lifetime ago, I spent 4 years as an undergrad at the IIT Bombay dabbling in debate, robotics and a ton of dynamics classes.
Connect with me over email at raunaqbhirangi [at] nyu [dot] edu!

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 every aspect of robotics. I think of myself as a full-stack roboticist, and my work spans hardware development, real-world robot learning, and dexterity.





PhD Thesis: Tactile sensing for Robot Learning: Development to Deployment Carnegie Mellon University, 2024
Master's Thesis: Learning Families of Behaviors for Legged Locomotion using Model-Free Deep Reinforcement Learning Carnegie Mellon University, 2020
- 16-748: Underactuated Robotics Fall 2020
- 10-708: Probabilistic Graphical Models Spring 2021
- MA 106: Linear Algebra Spring 2017
- ME 310: Microcontrollers and Automatic Control Lab Spring 2018