News

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!

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!

Dr. Zhao Han has just received $10,000 NSF CISE REU Student Funding via Computing Research Association (CRA)!

RARE lab presented 4 posters at the CITA Poster Session!

Spring is summer in Tampa–The RARE lab just had yet another lab lunch!

Our work on interaction learning with humanoid & recipe recommender AI social robot were presented at the 2026 USF Graduate Student Research Symposium. Great practice, Jingjing and Yixi!

Our HRI 2026 paper received the Theory Paper Honourable Mention award (21/128; top 16%)!

Congrats, Ridhima Phatak, for the successful defense of her MS thesis!!

RARE Lab had outreach at the second ACM AI Convention at USF! Amanuel and Jingjing showcased our robot learning and AI robot recommender projects!

Congrats to Hong and Ridhima on the paper acceptance to the International Journal of Social Robotics, the No. 1 HRI journal, per Google Scholar, with a 25% (110/483) acceptance rate: Indicating Robot Vision Capabilities with Augmented Reality!

Dr. Zhao Han will serve a mentor in the “Workshop YOUR study design” workshop at HRI 2026!

One LBR and one Interactivity paper were accepted to HRI 2026! Congrats Hong & Bao on “Evaluating Dynamic Surface Compensation for Robots with Projected AR” (LBR) & Bloom team (Thuc Anh, Div, Sebastian, Hong et al.) on “Bloom Preview: A Low-Cost LLM-Powered Social Robot” (interactivity)!

Dr. Zhao Han will serve as an associate editor (AE) for RO-MAN 2026!

Where will the new wave of humanoid robots lead us? See Prof. Han’s opinion in this Homes and Gardens article.

Dr. Zhao Han was invited to talk about the benefits of REU from his extensive mentoring experience. Vidhi, Grant, Jasmine, Alissa, Deekshita, and Sebastian presented posters!

“The RUSH Checklist: A Standardized Framework for Reporting User Studies in Human-Robot Interaction” has been accepted to the 2026 ACM/IEEE HRI conference. See you in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK!

Dr. Zhao Han’s and RARE Lab graduate students’ efforts on mentoring undergraduate students are featured in Computing Research News by CRN! Good job, Hong, Ridhima, Amanual, and Jingjing!

The end of ¼ century marks the start of Spring, which we gather and celebrate at another lab lunch!

Aired on TV (FOX13 Tampa Bay), we are glad to engage the public with our in-part NSF-funded research! Watch it or read the short news article.

RARE Lab’s NSF-funded projected-AR for robotics project is being featured for half a month on the USF homepage for a week. Read it here!

Our paper “Givenness hierarchy theoretic sequencing of robot task instructions“ was just published in the top HRI journal, “Frontiers in Robotics and AI!”

Dr. Zhao Han serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2026.

Five RARE Lab undergraduate researchers received the competitive Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) funding by the Computing Research Association (CRA)! Congrats, Aditi, Aarav, Sofia, Rex, and Thuc Ahn!

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $411,578 to Dr. Zhao Han (PI) for “Collaborative Research: FRR: Enabling Robots with Adaptive Projector-Based AR in Dynamic Environments” with Dr. Arie Kaufman from Stony Brook University!

Congrats to Xiangfei Kong on being awarded the Rada Scholarship in Al and Healthcare for the 2025-2026 school year!

RARE Lab’s Bloom robot with an older-adults application, our preliminary work, was presented at the OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium! Good job, Andrew, Rex, and Sofia!

Congrats to 11 undergraduate researchers on completion of the UR2PhD research course: Aarav, Paramveer, Thao, Aditi, Abrar, Sofia, Anjali, Rex, Miguel, and Thuc Anh! Also, congrats, Amanual and Xiangfei, on finishing the Graduate Student Mentorship Training!

June is here, and Summer starts. Welcome, new and old lab members!

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

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!

Two RARE Lab undergraduate researchers were awarded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) funding by the Computing Research Association (CRA). Congrats, Tammy and Chi.

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

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!

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!

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

RARE Lab’s four works were presented at the renowned HRI conference in Australia!

RARE Lab’s fog machine controller work was accepted to the 8th International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed-Reality for Human-Robot Interactions (VAM-HRI) at HRI 2025! Congrats to Adrian Lozada and Michael Klein!

RARE Lab’s robot vision capability work leveraging familiar experiences was accepted to the “Explainability for Human-Robot Collaboration: Real-World Concerns” Workshop (X-HRI) at HRI 2025! Congrats to Hong Wang and Maria Julia Vidal!

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!

RARE Lab participated in the USF ACM AI Convention outreach event! Minh Ha and Maria showcased our research on indicating a robot’s vision capability with a Pepper robot and AR headset.

Dr. Zhao Han will chair the paper session 2B: Teleoperation and Shared Autonomy at HRI 2025. See you in Melbourne from 13:00 – 14:35 on Tuesday, March 4!

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.

Dr. Zhao Han will be a publication chair at HRI 2026 to help the community grow!