Pranav Yerramaneni

Computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, class of 2028, and legged-robot research at the HARE Lab. Based in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, California.

Open to firmware, robotics and applied-ML internships for summer 2027.

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A reaction-wheel pendulum under a 240 Hz feedback loop. Drag it, nudge it, or scroll fast, and watch it recover.

  • Undergraduate researcher, HARE Lab, UC Santa Cruz

    Santa Cruz · July 2026 to present · JAX · MuJoCo MJX · PPO · Python

    • The Unitree Go2 quadruped mid-stride on a grey grid floor, rendered by the browser simulation
      This is the walking policy I trained, live: MuJoCo in WebAssembly at 500 Hz, the network at 50 Hz. I am putting the same policy file on the real robot. Click it, then W A S D to move, Q E to turn, Space to push.

  • Dual-reaction-wheel humanoid balance

    2024 to 2025 · C++ · Teensy 4.1 · Python · Raspberry Pi · ODrive CAN

    • Balancing on one leg, then switching legs. I wrote the C++ on a Teensy 4.1 and the Python on a Raspberry Pi that drive six ODrive motors over 1 Mbps CAN with PID at 250 Hz. Two diagonal reaction wheels, decoupled into independent roll and pitch torques, do the balancing.

  • Firmware engineer intern, Nova Robotics ↗

    Santa Clara · February 2025 to March 2026 · Python · C++ · C# · CUDA · ODrive CAN · Unity/OpenXR

    • Rokx from the front: a white head with two stereo camera eyes on a yellow and grey body over drive wheels
      Rokx, Nova's robot: ZED stereo cameras for eyes, a two-axis head and neck, an arm and drive wheels on five ODrive motors, which I drive from a Raspberry Pi over dual 1 Mbps CAN.
    • Rokx from the side, showing the yellow arm and a drive wheel
      On the Jetson Nano, I fine-tuned a quantized LLaVA vision-language model with LoRA adapters to run at 15+ FPS, up from 1 to 2, and gave VibeVoice text-to-speech a streaming OpenAI-compatible server (pull request 59): audio from the first token.
    • Rokx in three-quarter view with its head turned
      I built the Meta Quest teleop in Unity/OpenXR: 60 Hz head tracking drives the head and neck, stereo ZED video comes back. WebSockets and hardware encoding cut latency from 1.2 s to under 100 ms; UDP discovery makes setup zero-configuration.
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  • Co-founder and lead engineer, CometKits ↗

    Santa Clara · September 2022 to June 2025 · C/C++ · ESP-IDF · EasyEDA · Blockly · PlatformIO

    • Still from the NBC Bay Area segment: the CometKits team with students and their robot cars
      Low-cost robotics kits for elementary schools. I co-founded the program and wrote the ESP-IDF firmware for its custom ESP32 boards; 500+ students so far, recognized by the mayor and covered by NBC Bay Area.
    • The browser IDE I built: Blockly blocks become C++, a server with a cached toolchain compiles only the student's code, and the robot flashes over Web Serial or Bluetooth. My PlatformIO CI and over-the-air updates keep 250+ classroom units current.
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  • FTC Team 8872, Robopocalypse ↗

    Wilcox High School · 2022 to 2025 · Java · FTC SDK · Road Runner · OpenCV

    • The 2024-25 season robot on the practice field. I was co-captain and software lead of a team that reached the 2024 FIRST Championship in Houston.
    • Render of the 2024-25 robot: a black chassis with tall linear slides, a yellow servo-driven claw and a lit number panel
      The robot rendered from its CAD model. I led the five-person software crew that wrote its Road Runner motion planning, OpenCV vision and autonomous routines in Java on the FTC SDK.
    • Voyager, the pathfinding library I wrote for FTC robots, with its own docs site, plans routes like this one; my AxonProgrammer configures Axon servos from macOS and Linux. Illustration, not telemetry.
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Human LLM