ABOUT
Hey There.
I'm Pranay Tummalapalli, a robotics engineer with five years of experience building systems that have to work outside the lab. Most of that time has been spent on control systems and embedded software, and increasingly on the question of how learned policies behave when they meet the real world.
My work spans humanoid upper-body robotic limbs, robot-assisted laparoscopic and orthopaedic surgery platforms, and autonomous vehicle systems. The through-line has been precision under real constraints: surgical systems taken through clinical validation, and autonomous driving tested in Indian traffic rather than on a closed track. More recently I've been working on vision-language-action models, and specifically on measuring where they actually hold up under perturbation rather than assuming they do.
Outside of engineering, I'm a classically trained tabla player. I also ride motorcycles, mostly long-distance touring. Something about a few hundred kilometres of open highway does more for a stuck problem than another hour at the desk.
