He is the recipient of a 1992 NSF Research Initiation Award, a 1994 NSF young investigator award, a 2001-2002 College of Engineering teaching excellence award, and a 2004 IBM Faculty Award and multiple Google Research Awards (2007, 2010, 2013 & 2016). In 2004, he was named a Fellow of AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). In 2011, he was selected by ASU students to give a Last Lecture. In 2017, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2018, he was dubbed a "distinguished almnnus" by the Computer Science Department of University of Maryland, College Park (with his own wall plaque and all!). In 2019, he was named a fellow of the Association for the Computing Machinery (ACM). Within his department, he has been recognized both for his teaching (Teacher of the year, 2012) and research (Best Researcher, 2005, 2017). What Rao lacks in a Wikipedia page, he more than makes up with his IMDB page.
He was an invited speaker at AAAI 1996 and ICAPS 2003. He also gave a couple of well received tutorials on planning and databases, including one on automated planning (AAAI-2000), one on information integration on the web (AAAI-2002 and AAAI-2007), and one on planning graph heuristics (ICAPS 2006, IJCAI 2007).