About Me

Hi, I’m Rishi Jangale! I design mechanical hardware built to survive harsh environments, from requirements on novel systems through fabrication and field testing. I completed my bachelor's and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University under Dr. Robert Ambrose.

My work centers on large mobile robots for extraterrestrial environments. My main project, RoboBall, is novel enough that no design requirements existed for it, so a significant part of my research has been deriving them: characterizing materials, building predictive models, and turning empirical results into constraints that now shape both my designs and my colleagues'. That work involves design for robustness, manufacturability, and assembly as much as raw performance, and I work closely with controls and actuator engineers so their constraints shape the mechanical design rather than getting worked around afterward.

I'm experienced in mechanisms, powertrain design, and CNC machining, and I back designs with analysis: efficiency modeling, material characterization and deformation modeling, and failure analysis. I favor a “build-fast, test-fast” approach, which showed up most clearly in taking RoboBall III Gen 2 from preliminary design to functional prototype in 4 months.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending and presenting at several conferences, such as IEEE Aerospace, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE RoboSoft, and the invite-only Amazon MARS hosted by Jeff Bezos.

I am a U.S. Person looking for mechanical design work on hardware that has to survive its environments: from conceptualization to fabrication to field-testing.