Reality, Autonomy, and Robot Experience (RARE) Lab

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

HRI 2025 Full Paper Acceptance

RARE Lab’s fog screen work was accepted to the HRI conference (25% acceptance rate)! Congrats to Uthman, Adrian, Villa, and Hong!

Undergraduate Researcher Vlad Krukhmalev has joined the RARE lab, working at the intersection of AR and HRI. Welcome!

Mid-Fall Lab Lunch

We just had our mid-fall lab lunch. German style!

(Sorry that Maria, Felix, and Jonathan were unable to join!)

Undergraduate Researcher Adrian Lozada‘s first conference paper was submitted. Congrats!

DevFest Tampa Bay 2024

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!

Undergraduate students Maria Julia Vidal (9/4) and Felix Mendez (9/17) have joined the RARE lab. Welcome!

Congrats to Uthman Tijani for receiving Dr. Joy A. O’Shields Honorary Scholarship in Engineering. Thanks to donor Lakecia Gunter for supporting underrepresented students!

Research

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

Recent Publications

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
Designing Indicators to Show a Robot’s Physical Vision Capability

Designing Indicators to Show a Robot’s Physical Vision Capability

IEEE VR 2024 Poster
Causal-HRI: Causal Learning for Human-Robot Interaction

Causal-HRI: Causal Learning for Human-Robot Interaction

HRI 2024 Workshop Abstract
3rd Workshop on Inclusive HRI: Equity and Diversity in Design, Application, Methods, and Community

3rd Workshop on Inclusive HRI: Equity and Diversity in Design, Application, Methods, and Community

HRI 2024 Workshop Abstract
Reactive or Proactive? How Robots Should Explain Failures

Reactive or Proactive? How Robots Should Explain Failures

HRI 2024