MechE + Robotics + AI @ CMU

Arnav Arora

Mechanical Engineering student at Carnegie Mellon building systems that sit at the intersection of robotics, AI, and real-world impact.

System Active:

Grab and drag the highlighted cards using the robotic arm's end effector.

Experiences

2026 - Present

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Manufacturing Engineering Intern

Building intelligent robotic systems for product testing at the Chemical Analysis Division.

2025 - 2026

CMU MetaMobility Lab

Undergraduate Researcher

Investigated the biomechanical efectiveness of combined hip and knee exoskeletons to increase stability and correction upon perturbation detection, instability, and imbalance through user testing and simulation. Also designed rigid, adjustable exoskeleton systems around an NVIDIA Jetson to decrease sensor-reading fluctuation.

2024 - Present

Carnegie Mellon University

B.S. Mechanical Engineering | Minors: AI & Robotics

Focused on discovering the intersection of the physical world and AI. Primary coursework in AI/ML, computer vision, controls for robotics, and mechanical engineering principles.

2024 - Present

Undergraduate Consulting Club

Consultant / Member

Working through ambiguous, unstructured problems and molding them into structured, actionable solutions. Collaborating with high-performing teams to think critically and iterate quickly.

2022 - 2024

Spartans FTC Team 20808

Captain & Mentor

Contributed to a nationally competitive team. Led rapid design, build, and test cycles via CAD-driven prototyping. Implemented advanced control systems featuring object tracking, odometry-based localization, and FSMs.

About Me

I'm a third year Mechanical Engineering student at CMU focused on robot learning—bridging perception, control, and motion planning to enable machines to act effectively in the real world.

My work spans closed loop control systems, trajectory optimization, and learning based approaches to improve robot performance and intelligence. I'm drawn to problems where robust mechanical design meets intelligent algorithms: building systems that can adapt, learn, and execute with precision under real world constraints.

I approach engineering through rapid prototyping and iteration—from CAD and fabrication through control validation—reducing the gap between simulation and physical deployment.

Core Toolset

  • SolidWorks & AutoCAD
  • Machining, 3D Printing, Laser Cutting
  • Control Systems, FSMs, Robot Learning, Motion Planning
  • Python, C, MATLAB, Java, C++
  • PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Numpy, Pandas, OpenCV, GIT

Selected Works

MediaPipe / Flask / JS / scikit-learn

controlmusic.art

A real-time hand gesture recognition system that enables touchless video playback control through machine learning.

Mechanical Design / Closed-loop Control

Perturbation Controller

An ankle-based perturbation controller to enable realistic testing of lower-limb exoskeletal systems under trip and slip conditions.

CAD / CNC / Control Systems

Spartans Robotics

Design and manufacturing of weight-optimized mechanisms including a reverse four-bar linkage and a differential 3-axis wrist.

PyTorch / Einops / Transformers

Decoder-Only Transformer

A GPT-style language model built from scratch with custom multi-head attention and trained on text data.

PyTorch / TorchVision / CNNs

AlexNet & Transfer Learning

An implementation of the AlexNet architecture from scratch and fine-tuning experiments on ASL datasets.

Project Title

Tech Stack