Pranay Junare
Computer Vision | Deep Learning | Machine Learning
Hello! I’m a Master's student in Robotics and a Research Assistant at the University of Minnesota (UMN). Currently, I am a Summer Intern at Woven by Toyota, Inc. Previously, I worked as a Software Developer at ION Trading and was a Research Intern at NTU-Singapore and MITACS-Canada.
I am the recipient of JN Tata Scholarship'24 for my Master’s studies. Currently at UMN, I work closely with Prof. Karthik Desingh and Prof. Jiarong Hong as a Graduate Research Assistant.
I am fundamentally passionate about understanding how human perception & manipulation work and how we can build autonomous systems that have a tremendous positive social impact. In pursuit of this passion, I aim to build autonomous perception systems that are at par with the inherent human cognitive capabilities. My research interests broadly lies in Embodied AI and Large Foundation Models, especially in the domains of Robot Learning, Perception, Imitation Learning and VLMs.
Previously, I was a Summer Research Intern at NTU-Singapore under Dr. Xie Ming and was funded by the NTU-India Connect Research Fellowship. I was also fortunate enough to have worked with Dr. Scott Nokleby under the Canadian MITACS-Globalink'21 Research Scholarship.
Note : I am actively seeking Co-op opportunities for Spring 2026.
News
| May 27, 2025 | Joined Woven by Toyota for my Summer Internship. Super Excited! |
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| May 1, 2025 | I will be at ICRA 2025 🤖 - See you all at the conference in Atlanta, GA. |
| Mar 1, 2025 | Represented MnRI at First Saturday Science event. Checkout here. |
| Jan 1, 2025 | Aced by IRS tests😎! I am officially a certified IRS tax consultant and will continue to volunteer at NRVTAP. |
| Sep 3, 2024 | Started working as a Research Assistant at the FFIL Laboratory, focusing on Sim2Real transfer, Reinforcement Learning, Foundation Models, and Multi-agent Swarm Intelligence. |
| Aug 26, 2024 | Started my Masters journey at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, USA |
| Aug 16, 2024 | Adios ION Trading! Today marks my last day at this amazing place. |
| Jul 31, 2024 | Glad to share that I have been awarded JN Tata Scholarship-2024!  |
| Dec 14, 2023 | Super excited to meet and connect with multiple roboticists at ROSCon India 2023 at IISc, Bangalore. |
| Jul 10, 2023 | Had fun attending Robotics & AI Summer School 2023 at IRI-UPC, Spain. |
| Dec 1, 2022 | Presented our final year work at IEEE India Council’s flagship conference - INDICON’22. |
| Jun 1, 2022 | Won “Best Final Year BTech Project Award” for our Thesis project “Deep Learning based end-to-end Robotic Grasping pipeline on a low-cost 5-DOF robotic arm”. |
| May 1, 2022 | Won Consolation prize at “DTE’s Project Competition’22” among 110+ teams. |
| May 1, 2022 | Won 3rd prize at “M-Exhibit UG Project Competition’22” among 40+ teams. |
| Dec 25, 2021 | Our work on Visual SLAM has been published in IEEE ICCCA’21 Conference. |
| Dec 1, 2021 | Received multiple fulltime offers from ION Trading, Renishaw and IIIT Hyderabad. |
| Dec 1, 2021 | Presented my very first research paper in ARMS at DRDO-Pune!  |
| May 1, 2021 | Started internship at prestigious NTU-Singapore under Dr. Xie Ming. Working at the intersection of Robotics. Computer Vision and Deep Learning. |
| May 1, 2021 | Started my Summer Research Internship at Canada’s OntarioTech University under MITACS-GRI. In addition, received scholarship of $15,000 for future graduate studies. |