Dr. Wenhao Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at
Lamar University, where he joined in Fall 2024.
His research focuses on the integration of Augmented Reality (AR),
Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) with robotics and industrial systems, with particular emphasis on
human-robot interaction, immersive training environments, and resilient system design.
He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering from
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2023.
His work spans interdisciplinary areas including advanced manufacturing, human-computer interaction (HCI), and
user-centered system design, aiming to develop scalable and effective solutions for complex engineering challenges.
Dr. Yang has extensive experience in developing and teaching courses
in robotics and immersive technologies, including ST: Collab Robot Ops Pro, ST: AR/VR in Manufacturing,
Introduction to Robotics, and Robotics and Automation in Manufacturing.
He is passionate about making complex technologies accessible and impactful through both research and education.
He directs the XRAI Lab, where his team
explores innovative approaches at the intersection of robotics, XR technologies, and industrial applications.
Dr. Yang welcomes motivated students to join the lab and contribute to research in these areas.
Outside the lab, he builds and ships software — most recently
Wherefold, a bilingual travel platform built on a structured database of 5,110 curated
US attractions that he assembled and now visualizes through an interactive map.
LiveSolo developer — data curation, backend, frontend, deployment2026-06–2026-08
A structured travel-attraction database of my own construction — 5,110 attractions across 1,274 US cities and 36 national parks, each curated across 20+ fields (coordinates, category, opening hours, pricing tier, contact info, bilingual descriptions, suggested visit duration, best time to visit, transportation, photo tips) — surfaced through an interactive bilingual (English/Chinese) data-visualization platform I designed and built end to end. The database was assembled through a scraping-plus-curation pipeline against Google Places and Wikipedia, with every field reviewed and normalized before publication; the platform layer turns that dataset into a single explorable Mapbox map with filtering, full-text search, and a community feedback loop (tips, ratings, and error reports) that keeps the data current after launch. Full stack: React/TypeScript frontend rendering the dataset as a Mapbox GeoJSON layer, an Express/Prisma API over PostgreSQL, deployed on Vercel and Railway.
ReactTypeScriptViteTailwind CSSMapbox GL JSZustand+6 more
INEN 6301 Advanced Robotics palletizing challenge: the UR10e picked six cubes off the conveyor and stacked them on a 2 × 3 pallet, and the winning team finished in 71.794 s — read about the challenge.
October 12, 2026
Our proposal ‘AI-Resilient Assessment: An LLM-Facilitated Oral Defense Protocol for STEM Graduate Education’ was selected for the Lamar University 2026–2027 Excellence in Assessment Grant.
October 5, 2026
INEN 6301 Advanced Robotics second UR10e race, this time with the conveyor and sensors driven through I/O: Group 2 ran the fastest cycle — read about the task.
September 28, 2026
INEN 6301 Advanced Robotics lab session in the renovated XRAI Lab: students raced a UR10e pick-and-place task, and Group 1 won in 11.328 s with zero errors — read about the session and the lab.
