Omair Siddique
M.S. Robotics, Northeastern University
I'm an MS Robotics student at Northeastern with a background in electrical engineering and embedded systems, working mostly around robotics, control, and AI. I like getting into the details of building robots from the ground up, working closely with sensors and actuators.
I'm equally interested in building AI models, especially reinforcement learning, that help legged robots and assistive devices like exoskeletons and prosthetics move in a natural, human-like way. A lot of my interest is in taking what we learn in theory and making it run on real hardware, even if it means a lot of trial and error along the way.
Selected projects
Rotary Inverted Pendulum
Ongoing
Hardware for validating Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA), now moving to simulation to close the sim-to-real gap.
ZMP Analysis & Motion Generation for Humanoids
Final year project, extended
Reproduced CLoSD and added zero-moment point analysis to check whether diffusion-generated humanoid motions are dynamically stable.
Self-Balancing Robot
A two-wheeled self-balancing robot built from scratch, first on Arduino Nano and then rebuilt on ESP32.
Experience
- Nov 2025 – Jul 2026
Embedded Design Engineer, Signatics Pvt Ltd
Islamabad, Pakistan
- Designed and implemented low-level hardware blocks in Verilog on Xilinx Zynq-7000 and UltraScale+ SoCs, with bare-metal C/C++ drivers for custom peripherals and accelerators.
- As lead engineer, ran the teardown and design-recovery of an automatic antenna tracker, coordinating with the hardware team to trace the PCB routing into a layout of the major components.
- With only the compiled binary available, reverse-engineered and rewrote the STM32 (Blue Pill) firmware for closed-loop pan and tilt motor control: the digital compass, the optical encoders on both motors, and the motor drivers.
- May 2026 – Jul 2026
Research Assistant, LLM Bias Study, NUST
Remote
- Implemented and executed the experimental pipeline for a study evaluating bias in LLMs, designed by a PhD student; manuscript currently under review.
- Oct 2024 – Apr 2025
GenAI Intern, SkyLabs-AI
Islamabad, Pakistan (Hybrid)
- Worked on developing an explainability dataset for solving the Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a reasoning benchmark for AI models, and generated synthetic data to improve generalization to unseen patterns.
- Jul 2024 – Aug 2024
Advanced AI Bootcamp on LLMs, NUST
Islamabad, Pakistan
- Completed advanced training on transformer models, fine-tuning, mixture-of-experts, and efficient inference methods, with access to an NVIDIA H100 supercomputer.
- Led a capstone team to fine-tune an LLM that generated Python code from LaTeX expressions, winning 2nd place in accuracy (within 3% of the top team) and 1st place in inference speed (20× faster than the 2nd-best team).
- Jul 2023 – Sep 2023
Lab Assistant, Embedded Systems Lab, NUST
Islamabad, Pakistan
- Conducted an STM32 microcontroller training camp for Saudi students and local industry professionals.
Education
- Expected Dec 2028
Northeastern University
M.S. in Robotics, College of Engineering, Boston, MA
- June 2025
National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST)
B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Islamabad, Pakistan
CGPA 3.51/4.00. GRE 322/340 (167Q, 155V).
Relevant coursework: Linear Control Systems, Computer Vision, Embedded System Design, Numerical Methods.
Skills
- Robotics and controls
- PID control, Sensor fusion (IMU, complementary and low-pass filtering), Zero-moment point (ZMP) analysis, RL for locomotion
- AI / ML
- Transformer architectures, LLM fine-tuning, Diffusion models, Synthetic data generation
- Embedded and hardware
- STM32, ESP32, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Xilinx Zynq-7000 and UltraScale+ SoCs, FreeRTOS, PCB design
- Languages and HDL
- C, C++, Python, Verilog
- CAD and tools
- Fusion 360, Autodesk Inventor, Altium Designer, WSL2 / Linux