About Me

Hi! My name is Jay Rana and I am currently a Master’s student at the University of Maryland College Park (UMD). I am pursuing a MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMD and intend to specialize in Control, Robotics, Autonomy, and Learning (CRAL).

Academic Experience

I graduated from UMD with a BS in Computer Engineering and a Minor in Robotics and Autonomous Systems in May of 2025. Below is a list of relevant undergraduate coursework:

Robotics Planning and Perception
Robotics Project Laboratory
Capstone Design Project: Autonomous Control of Interacting Robots
Digital Computer Design (graduate-level)
Digital Control Systems
Signal and System Theory
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Research Experience

I was in the Gemstone Honors Program at UMD. As part of Team Affordable Natural Disaster Relief Robotics (ANDRR), I researched, prototyped, and tested an accessible modular system that can be attached to hobby quadcopters to enable onboard computer vision for the purposes of disaster relief. Our research started in the Fall of 2022 and concluded in the Spring of 2025. We wrote a thesis and successfully defended it in front of a panel of discussants. You can learn more about our research and read our thesis here.

Over the summer of 2025, I plan to work with Dr. Yiannis Aloimonos and Levi Burner on computer vision research regarding optical flow.

Project Experience

DogBot

Using a TurtleBot 3 Burger and an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX, we implemented a