Manideep Reddy Tamma

Projects

Roughly a decade of building things, from a pen plotter made in a college workshop to soft robotic devices now in clinical use in the United States. A fuller slide-by-slide version lives in my project portfolio.

Medical robotics : Bioliberty

Bioliberty · shipped, FDA-registered

Lifeglov / Lifehub

Soft robotic rehabilitation system for upper-limb recovery after stroke. Lifeglov is a purely pneumatic wearable; Lifehub is the controller that drives it, runs the therapy modes and captures session data. Named co-inventor on the resulting PCT application.

Firmware safety architecture for the whole pneumatic system: test sequencing, failure thresholds, diagnostic outputs and safe-state recovery, now used to validate and service every unit before and after clinical deployment
Led the engineering design of the production system: software and database built from scratch for firmware deployment, device tracking, automated in-line testing and clinical-grade traceability
Made the technical design decisions for the Bluetooth Low Energy stack, balancing medical-grade reliability, power and data integrity. Runs in every deployed Lifehub unit
Scaled the flagship product from prototype to 100+ commercial units in active US clinical use
Currently engineering the firmware architecture for the next generation of Lifeglov
Deployed at Sheltering Arms Institute, Lifepoint Rehabilitation, Mt. Sinai Abilities Research Centre and the US Department of Veterans Affairs

Bioliberty · internal R&D, 2023 – 2024

Projects Naur and Pare

The internal R&D programmes from which the invention in WO2025190946A1 emerged. Mechanical design, additive manufacturing, firmware and scripting across STM32 and Nordic nRF52840.

Pressure-waveform-based motion sensing, replacing discrete sensors
Undesired-movement detection for spasticity safety
Adaptive parallel and series gas pump configurations
Now the technical core of the FDA-registered product line, and the subject of the patent

Innovate UK · £435,000 · ref. 10071274

Biomedical Catalyst programme

Served as mechatronics engineer on a grant-funded research programme, engineering the machine learning and data-collection architecture for the soft robotic glove.

Data-collection pipeline and sensing architecture for the glove
Awarded December 2023

Personal builds

Open source · in progress

Project Carl

A home plant-monitoring system that scales from one plant to a houseful. Sensor nodes over BLE, an ESP32-S3 hub, a cloud backend and an iPhone app. Named after Linnaeus. Three repositories, one contract between them, currently running in my flat.

FirmwareCloudiOS

BTHome v2 advertisements encrypted per-node with AES-CCM-128, replay-protected by the BTHome counter
Zephyr / nRF Connect SDK on XIAO nRF52840 probes and a Thingy:53 room node; ESP-IDF on the hub
Project Norman : MQTT ingestion, Postgres with TimescaleDB, FastAPI, Terraform on GCP
SwiftUI app with Bonjour hub discovery on the LAN and cloud failover when away from home
REST API defined by an OpenAPI spec that the iOS app and an M5Paper e-paper reader both compile against
Open to contributors across firmware, backend, iOS and design

Study · in progress

Assistax reproduction

Reproducing a JAX/MJX multi-agent RL benchmark for assistive robotics on hardware I actually have, then on rented GPUs when that ran out.

IPPO baselines trained on the scratch-itch task; 40M timesteps
Local GTX 1660 Ti first, then an L4 on GCP once memory and time became the constraint
Write-up in Writing

Earlier professional work

Space Resources Laboratory · 2022 – 2023

Project Ampère : CubeSat magnetorquer

Proof-of-concept magnetorquer module for 3U CubeSat attitude control at the Barclays Eagle Lab, Cranfield. Joined as an R&D intern and moved to engineer within six months.

Combined additive manufacturing with conventional fabrication
Validated magnetic moment performance against design targets using FEMM electromagnetic analysis
Researched and designed control architecture for a 3U CubeSat platform, delivering grant-funded R&D milestones

Volador FlyTech · 2022

BLDC test rigs and vision system

Control and autonomous navigation subsystems for an ultra-light eVTOL aircraft, plus the test hardware to characterise its propulsion.

Two generations of brushless DC motor test rig : ATmega328P, then Raspberry Pi Pico and 4B, enabling systematic propulsion-efficiency measurement and failure-point characterisation
Vision-based navigation integrating OpenCV, ROS and Pixhawk Cube Orange flight controllers
Scaled drone prototypes on DJI Naza V3 and Pixhawk, with DJI Tello platforms for computer-vision testing

Self-employed, Upwork · 2020 – 2022

Freelance mechanical and embedded design

Mechanical design, additive manufacturing and robotics work for clinical, industrial and consumer clients.

Single-hand-operated syringe holder for TechnoSmiles dental practice: identified the clinical need and took it from concept to clinician deployment
Mechanical housing and integration software (ROS, C++, Python) for a portable LiDAR scanning unit
Firmware and a Bluetooth communication stack (ATmega328P, C++) for Carbonado Backpacks’ connected motorcycle backpack

Futuristic Labs · 2021

Smart induction base

Thermal sensing for a connected induction cooking vessel, now sold as CookWithSemi.

Researched thermal sensor placement and benchmarked performance with Fusion 360 thermal simulations
Firmware integration on STM32; instrumentation in LabVIEW

Nuclear Fuel Complex, Dept. of Atomic Energy · 2018

Billet cooling redesign

Redesigned the cooling mechanism for billet manufacturing during fuel-rod-shell production at a Government of India nuclear fuel facility.

Improved process efficiency by approximately 20%
Saved an estimated 30 man-hours per month while increasing production quality

Academic

MSc thesis · Cranfield with the MTC · 2022

Low-latency real-time 3D environment rendering

A real-time 3D rendering architecture for sub-100ms-latency tele-robotic control, carried out in industry collaboration with the Manufacturing Technology Centre.

Point Cloud Library, OpenGL, OpenNI2 and Qt5 under C++ STL 11/17
TCP/IP and UDP transport, built with CMake, Boost and Eigen3

MSc group project · Best Project, Cranfield and Ocado · 2022

Robot receptionist

Co-architected a PAL TIAGo-based hotel receptionist robot for DoubleTree by Hilton MK and MK 5G. Awarded Best Group Project by Cranfield University and Ocado Technology.

SLAM-based autonomous navigation on ROS
Computer vision with OpenCV and natural language interaction

UKSEDS competition · CranSEDS · 2022

Olympus Rover

Volunteer software contributor to Cranfield’s entry in the UKSEDS Olympus Rover competition.

C++20 on Raspberry Pi 4, with TCP/IP and UDP networking

BTech final year project · 2018

Smart surveillance mobile robot

A multi-terrain robot architecture integrating Raspberry Pi 3B and Arduino for embedded control, camera-based vision and IoT remote command.

Combined mechanical chassis fabrication and welding with embedded software development

BTech · Best Engineered Project, CVR College · 2018

CNC pen plotter

Designed the mechanical system and wrote the firmware to convert digital drawings into physical hard copies. Awarded Best Engineered Project by CVR College of Engineering.

Arduino Uno, stepper motor control, C++