Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

From the fabrication floor to the incubator’s loft, the MIX demonstrates how principles of entrepreneurship and innovation aren’t so easily siloed with two new courses: BLIMP and Student Innovator Mastermind.

Blimps filled the EagleBank Arena air at the Lighter Than Air (LTA) Defend the Republic competition in April. The winning Mason team, led by principal investigators Cameron Nowzari, Ningshi Yao, and Daigo Shishika, competed against six universities and about 50 LTA "blimps."

Missy Cummings, one of the country’s first female fighter pilots and the director of Mason’s autonomy and robotics center, calls herself a tech futurist, charged with making tech work and helping it get better. She isn’t shy about calling out bad tech either, including the vision systems in self-driving cars and Tesla’s Autopilot.

Kirkpatrick's research is interdisciplinary, cutting across such fields as Philosophy, Political Science, Public Policy, and Computer Science

Research Interests: Computer architecture, CMOS VLSI ASIC design, FPGA-based system design, and GPU architecture and programming

Research Interests: Human-robot interactions, human-robot co-learning, bio-inspired robotics, distributed resource allocation

Research Interests: Multi-robot systems, multi-agent games