Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

Missy Cummings, a George Mason University mechanical engineering professor, calls herself a “tech futurist,” whose job is to “make tech work. It’s not to stop tech, it’s to help it get better.”

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.

A team of six from George Mason earned an award for teamwork and collaboration at the 2022 Maritime RobotX competition in Australia after working with competitors from two other universities.

Drawn by Mason’s multidisciplinary research and teaching, Missy Cummings will create a new program in the design and deployment of Artificial Intelligence.

Research Interests: Perception, tactile sensing, robotic manipulation

Research Interests: Field Robotics, Motion Planning, Machine Learning

Sabrina Stenberg sees the SMART scholarship as a way to maximize her graduate studies at George Mason while remaining employed as a chemical engineer with the Department of Defense (DoD). Through the scholarship, Stenberg can focus on her master of science in electrical engineering at Mason full-time.

Research Interests: Distributed learning for MAS, resilient multi-robot systems, distributed resource allocation, human-in-the-loop for MAS

Leigh McCue, associate professor and interim chair of mechanical engineering is looking to take a deeper dive into her research at the Vessel Dynamics Lab. The recent recipient of the Beck Foundation Faculty Fellow award is building a fleet of maritime robots and will use the funds from the award to expand this work.

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