Hi there! I'm Raunaq, CEO of Index Robotics, where we're building adaptive systems to automate contact-rich, industrial work.
Before Index, I was a postdoctoral researcher with Lerrel Pinto at NYU Courant teaching robots to perform precise and dexterous manipulation. I received my PhD from the Robotics Institute at CMU, where I was advised by Abhinav Gupta and Carmel Majidi. Previously, I was a Researcher at Meta AI leading efforts in tactile sensing and representations.
Before I started my PhD, I got a master's degree in Robotics working with Howie Choset, on legged and modular robots. A lifetime ago, I spent 4 years as an undergrad at IIT Bombay dabbling in debate, robotics and a ton of dynamics classes.
My work has spanned a broad spectrum of robotics, from designing physical systems to developing the learning algorithms that control them. I've worked on sensors, dexterous hands, legged robots, representation learning, and policies for complex manipulation. I particularly enjoy problems that require moving across the boundaries of hardware, sensing and learning. More recently, much of my work has centered on touch and contact-rich interaction as a path toward more capable and reliable robots.
