Members

Principal Investigator

Vaibhav Unhelkar

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Ken Kennedy Institute
Rice University

Current Members

Zhiqin "Bill" Qian

PhD Student

After-Action Reviews for Human-Robot Teams

Megh Bhalerao

PhD Student

Human Simulation for Human-Robot Interaction

Harrison Huang

PhD Student

NSF GRFP Hon. Mention

Explainable AI for Human-Robot Teaming

Omkar Shelke

PhD Student

Alignment of Multi-Agent Systems with Human Specifications

Ryan Diaz

PhD Student

NSF GRFP Awardee

Lifelong Learning for Human-Robot Teaming

Itamar Bar-Yossef

PhD Student

AI-Supported Apprenticeship Training

Panda

Collaborative Arm from Franka Emika

Robotic Assistant for Smart Manufacturing

Astrid

Mobile Manipulator from Hello Robot Inc.

Robotic Tutor for
Clinical Training

Stretch

Mobile Manipulator from Hello Robot Inc.

Robotic Assistant for Indoor Environments

Alumni

→ denotes the member's next position after Rice.

Postdoctoral Researchers

• Yao Rong → Assistant Professor, Leibniz University Hannover
  Explainable AI to inform Human Decisions
  Rice Future Faculty Fellow 2025-26
  Rising Stars in EECS Workshop at MIT Travel Award 2025
  Rice Academy Fellowship 2024
• M. Samin Yasar → Research Scientist, NEC Laboratories
  Human-in-the-Loop Robot Learning
  Co-advised with Prof. Lydia Kavraki and Prof. Vicente Ordóñez-Román

PhD Students

• Abhinav Jain → Research Scientist, Microsoft Research
  Efficient Adaptation of Foundation Models for Domain-Specific Deployments
  Co-advised with Prof. Christopher Jermaine
• Liubove Orlov Savko → Senior Software Engineer, Nvidia
  Formalizing Human-to-Robot Delegation in Sequential Tasks
  Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholarship 2020-2023
• Sangwon Seo → Software Engineer, Google
  AI-Assisted Coordination of Human Teams
  Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI) Doctoral Consortia 2024 Travel Award
• Peizhu "Pam" Qian → Assistant Professor, University of Houston
  Interactive AI Tutors for Training the Workforce of the Future
  Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneer 2025
  Rice Future Faculty Fellow 2024-25
  Conference on Health, Inference, & Learning (CHIL) Doctoral Symposia 2025 Travel Award
  Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2022 Best Video Award

MS Students

• Juan Hevia → Co-Founder, HeyBeta
• Janhavi Sathe → Senior Applied AI Engineer, Invoca
• Anusha Mishra → Data Scientist, CVS Health
• Mary Nam → Data Scientist, H-E-B
• Zachary Moxley → Software Engineer, Amazon Robotics
• Angela Wu → Software Engineer, Google

Undergraduates

• Isauro Sanchez
  Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow
• Jesus Terrazas
  Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow
• Arnan Bawa
• Sahitha Vuddagiri → PhD Student, USC
• Vinson Lu → Software Engineer, Microsoft
• Cheng Peng → Software Engineer, Oracle
• Harrison Huang → MS Student, Rice University
• Bing "Tim" Han → MS Student, CMU
• J. Bryant Cassady → Software Engineer, DRW
• Zhiqin "Bill" Qian → PhD Student, Rice University
• Joseph Gioia → Software Engineer, Meta
• Zhanyi Sun → PhD Student, Stanford University

Visitors

The lab hosts visitors through Rice’s visitor programs, such as Mehta Rice Engineering Scholars, Computer Science Student Advancement Program (CSSAP), and MACHI.

• Abhishek Jaiswal, IIT Kanpur, Mehta Rice Engineering Scholar
• Chih-Yi Lin, Feng-Chia University, MACHI Scholar
• Prem Raj, IIT Kanpur, Mehta Rice Engineering Scholar
• Arnav Adhikari, Carnegie Vanguard High School
• Filip Bajraktari, University of Belgrade, CSSAP Fellow
• Adriana Badran Campo, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, REU Scholar
• Viktor Katzenberger, University of Belgrade, CSSAP Fellow
• Radenko Pejic, University of Belgrade, CSSAP Fellow