This paper presents new families of Rao-type test statistics based on the
minimum density power divergence estimators which provide robust
generalizations for testing simple and composite null hypotheses. The
asymptotic null distributions of the proposed tests are obtained and their
robustness properties are also theoretically studied. Numerical illustrations
are provided to substantiate the theory developed. On the whole, the proposed
tests are seen to be excellent alternatives to the classical Rao test.