RARE Lab’s projectives work on mitigating robot abuse was accepted to the DEI-HRI workshop at HRI 2025! Ridhima Phatak will be on the DEI Student Pioneers panel, presenting the work followed by a panel discussion on research methodologies and applying DEI dimensions!
Reality, Autonomy, and Robot Experience (RARE) Lab
Prof. Zhao Han founded the RARE lab in August 2023 at the University of South Florida in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the College of Engineering (soon in the new College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Computing).
Mission
Our mission is to solve the grand challenges to bring and retain robots’ benefits to our society by designing and evaluating understandable robot interactions and capable robotic systems.
Vision
We envision an era of robots that provide superior robot experiences for humans to interact, collaborate, team up, and live with.
News
Dr. Zhao Han will be a publication chair at HRI 2026 and will chair the paper session on teleop and shared autonomy at HRI 2025. See you in Melbourne!
Congrats to 12 RARE Lab undergraduate students accepted to the CRA Undergraduate Research to PhD (“UR2PhD”) program: Tammy, Jonathan, Chi, Vlad, Maria, Tony, Khoa, Suyog, Bao, Minh Ha, Thom, and Khang!
Also congrats to two graduate students Hong and Ridhima accepted to Graduate Student Mentorship Training.
RARE Lab has a LinkedIn page now. Follow us there!
Kudos to Minh Ha Pham for creating and maintaining it!
Undergraduate students Tan Hoang Khoa Nguyen (1/6), Suyog Bam (1/14), Mariah Barreto (1/15), Ngoc Bao Dinh (1/21), and B.S. honors thesis student Minh Ha Pham (1/16) have joined RARE Lab. Khoa will work on the fog screen robot system. Suyog will work on LLM-enabled storytelling. Mariah will work on protectives to mitigate robot abuse. Bao will work on robot hardware. Minh Ha will work towards her honors thesis. Welcome!
RARE Lab’s fog screen work was accepted to the HRI conference (25% acceptance rate)! Congrats to Adrian, Uthman, Villa, and Hong!
Undergraduate students Vlad Krukhmalev (12/2), Tu (Tony) Nguyen (12/16), Michael Klein (12/20), and Nicolas Echeverria (12/20) have joined RARE Lab. Vlad and Tony will work on AR in HRI. Michael and Nicolas bring their mechanical engineering expertise. Welcome!
We just had our mid-fall lab lunch. German style!
(Sorry that Maria, Felix, and Jonathan were unable to join!)
RARE Lab participated in the DevFest Tampa Bay outreach event! Hong and Maria showcased our research on indicating a robot’s vision capability with a Pepper robot and AR headset.
B.S. Honors student Ashley Herbert (10/4), Jonathan Wong (10/17), and Chi Vo (10/28) have joined the RARE lab. Ashley will work on a thesis on robotics & dentistry. Jonathan will focus on robotics & AR/VR. Chi Vo will LLM-enabled storytelling robots. Welcome!
Research
Research focuses on interdisciplinary human-robot interaction (HRI), involving robotics, augmented reality (AR), AI, cognitive science, and psychology… See Research Overview →
