Ph.D. student Sakina Rao has joined the RARE Lab. Welcome!
Reality, Autonomy, and Robot Experience (RARE) Lab
Prof. Zhao Han leads the RARE lab in the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing at the University of South Florida.
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
Dr. Zhao Han will chair a paper session in RO-MAN 2026: TuA05 Manipulation, Teleoperation & Handovers I. See you in Fukuoka, Japan from 10:50-12:50 on Tuesday, August 25!
UMass Amherst student Adya Bharadwaj had just started her DREU at the RARE Lab at USF.
Our full paper was accepted to IEEE RO-MAN 2026: “Understanding Dentists? and Patients? Perspectives on Dentistry Robots: An Exploratory Study in Dentist-Patient-Robot Interaction”! Congrats to Ashley, Yixi, Hong, and Minh Ha!
Dr. Zhao Han was selected as a mentor in the CRA-WP Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) with $10,000 to be distributed to a matched mentee!
RARE Lab’s WIP explanable robotics work, “Towards Contextual Robot Intent Explanation for Hierarchical Vision–Language–Action Collaboration,” was accepted to the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Semantics for Reliable Robot Autonomy: From Environment Understanding and Reasoning to Safe Interaction. Congrats to Amanuel, Aarav, Yasa, et al.!
RARE Lab’s humanoid work in progress on “Towards Leveraging Humans’ Implicit Interaction Cues for Fluent Human-Humanoid Interaction” was accepted to the ICRA 2026 Workshop “Shared Challenges in Human-Centered and Resilient Robotic Autonomy!” Congrats, Yixi!
RARE Lab undergraduate students Alina and Stuti presented at the Second Bellini College REU Symposium!
Research
Research focuses on interdisciplinary human-robot interaction (HRI), involving robotics, AI, augmented reality (AR), cognitive science, and psychology… See Research Overview →
