Robotics researcher at the Correll Lab.
I work across perception, manipulation, and autonomy, with a growing focus on agentic systems and their limitations on low-cost hardware. The pull, like much of the field, is general-purpose physical intelligence. Currently an undergrad at CU Boulder. Senior thesis on embodied agentic AI starts fall 2026. Master's in robotics fall 2027.
Selected
arXiv · cs.RO · 2026
Cutting the Cord: System Architecture for Low-Cost, GPU-Accelerated Bimanual Mobile Manipulation
Artemis Shaw, Chen Liu, Justin Costa, Rane Gray, Alina Skowronek, Kevin Diaz, Nam Bui, Nikolaus Correll
Hugging Face × LeRobot Hackathon · June 2025
1st place, SO-101 + SmolVLA
Fine-tuned SmolVLA on 50 teleoperated drawing demonstrations and evaluated natural-language instruction-following on real SO-101 hardware.
Research
Correll Lab, CU Boulder · Since February 2025
- Head and neck pan-tilt subsystem for the Unitree H1-2 humanoid, from mechanism design through ROS 2 control and platform validation.
- Apple Vision Pro teleoperation interface for the H1-2 with head and pose tracking, building on the Open-Television line of work.
- YOLO-seg perception pipeline for detecting and segmenting screws in cluttered scenes, feeding downstream manipulation for EV battery disassembly.
Projects
Pincer
2026 - PresentVision-to-grasping pipeline for low-cost robotic hardware
A perception-to-manipulation system built on xLeRobot hardware with RGB-D sensing, camera-to-base transforms, and task-based inverse kinematics.
ranegray/pincer →
ROS2 Racer
2026Autonomy stack and telemetry dashboard for a small racecar
A modular ROS 2 workspace for autonomous racing experiments with sensor bringup, reactive navigation, and a live telemetry dashboard.
ranegray/ros2-racer →
Webots RL
2025Q-learning controller for e-puck track navigation
A reinforcement learning experiment in Webots that trains an e-puck to navigate a track using discretized infrared observations and reward shaping.
ranegray/webots_rl →
Previously
Ten years in the Air Force and Colorado Air National Guard as an F-16 avionics systems expert. Led a 23-person team sustaining mission-ready aircraft across Arizona, South Korea, Germany, and Colorado.