Reality, Autonomy, and Robot Experience (RARE) Lab

Mission

Our mission is to solve the grand challenges in human-centered robotics by designing and studying preferred robot interactions and capable robotic systems powered by AI.

Vision

We envision an era of interactive robots that provide superior robot experiences for humans to interact, collaborate, team up, and live with.


News

Learn RARE Lab’s latest research, outreach, and members’ achievements!


Xiangfei Kong MS Thesis Defense

Congrats, Xiangfei Kong, for the successful defense of her MS thesis!!

RARE Lab at ICRA 2025

We presented RARE Lab’s preliminary works on explainable robot learning and storytelling robot at the top robotics conference, ICRA 2025, in Atlanta. Stay tuned for our full papers and more!

Our interdisciplinary grant, “The Center for Biological and Food Innovations in AI and Robotics for Children’s Nutrition and Health (Bio-FAIRCH),” has been awarded $300,000 for USF Interdisciplinary Center Preparation Grants Full Proposal (ICPGs). Congrats to Dr. Tingting Zhang and all investigators!

Spring 2025 Lab Lunch

Spring concludes with a good lab gathering. Italy style! (Sorry that not all could come!)

ICRA 2025 FMNS Acceptance

RARE Lab’s multimodal storytelling social robot preliminary work was accepted to the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics. Congrats to Tammy, Chi, Felix, and Suyog!

Human-Centered Robot Learning Workshop at ICRA 2025 Acceptance

RARE Lab’s preliminary work on explaining transformer-based visual-motor policies was accepted to the ICRA 2025 workshop on Human-Centered Robot Learning in the Era of Big Data and Large Models. Congrats, Ammanuel Ergogo!

USF Graduate Student Research Symposium

RARE Lab’s protectives work on mitigating robot abuse was presented at the USF Graduate Student Research Symposium. Good job and great practice, Ridhima!

RO-MAN 2025 PC

Dr. Zhao Han will be on the international program committee at RO-MAN 2025 as an associate editor!

Research

Research focuses on interdisciplinary human-robot interaction (HRI), involving robotics, augmented reality (AR), AI, cognitive science, and psychology… See Research Overview →

Recent Publications

Implementing LLM-Integrated Storytelling Robot

Implementing LLM-Integrated Storytelling Robot

ICRA 2025 FMNS
Towards Embodied Agent Intent Explanation in Human-Robot Collaboration: ACT Error Analysis and Solution Conceptualization

Towards Embodied Agent Intent Explanation in Human-Robot Collaboration: ACT Error Analysis and Solution Conceptualization

ICRA 2025 HCRL
A Controller for Robots to Autonomously Control Fog Machine

A Controller for Robots to Autonomously Control Fog Machine

VAM-HRI 2025
Exploring Familiar Design Strategies to Explain Robot Vision Capabilities

Exploring Familiar Design Strategies to Explain Robot Vision Capabilities

XHRI 2025
Anywhere Projected AR for Robot Communication: A Mid-Air Fog Screen-Robot System

Anywhere Projected AR for Robot Communication: A Mid-Air Fog Screen-Robot System

HRI 2025
Introduction to the Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI)

Introduction to the Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI)

THRI
Do Results in Experiments with Virtual Robots in Augmented Reality Transfer To Physical Robots? An Experiment Design

Do Results in Experiments with Virtual Robots in Augmented Reality Transfer To Physical Robots? An Experiment Design

WYSD 2024
To Understand Indicators of Robots’ Vision Capabilities

To Understand Indicators of Robots’ Vision Capabilities

VAM-HRI 2024