dakarai crowder

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Wenzhen Yuan. My research interests include robotics, social physical human–robot interaction, tactile sensing, virtual reality, and haptics.

I currently work in the RoboTouch Lab on fabric-based tactile sensing for humanoid robots and virtual environments for human–robot interaction experiments.

Google Scholar GitHub LinkedIn

PUBLICATIONS

IROS 2026

Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human–Robot Interaction

Dakarai Crowder, Ruohan Zhang, Alexis E. Block, Wenzhen Yuan

Webpage Dataset arXiv
ICRA 2026

Tactile-Based Human Intent Recognition for Robot Assistive Navigation

Shaoting Peng, Dakarai Crowder, Wenzhen Yuan, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Webpage arXiv
ICRA 2025

Social Gesture Recognition in spHRI: Leveraging Fabric-Based Tactile Sensing on Humanoid Robots

Dakarai Crowder, Kojo Vandyck, Xiping Sun, James McCann, Wenzhen Yuan

Webpage arXiv
Biological Cybernetics, 2023

Extreme image transformations affect humans and machines differently

G. Malik, Dakarai Crowder, E. Mingolla

Paper
CVPR Workshop, 2022 (Oral)

Robustness of Humans and Machines on Object Recognition with Extreme Image Transformations

Dakarai Crowder^*, G. Malik^*

arXiv