Robots

A Brief History of George Mason Robots

Katarina Benson — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:59:40 +0000

A Brief History of George Mason Robots Katarina Benson Fri, 09/12/2025 - 11:59

From the pioneering RB5X that graced our alumni magazine's cover in 1986 to today's cutting-edge rescue robots that can navigate through smoke and fog, our students and faculty have consistently pushed the boundaries of what's possible. This journey through George Mason's robotics history showcases more than just technological achievements—it reveals how our community approaches complex challenges with creativity, determination, and purpose.

Click any image to view a larger version.

Cover Photo by Carl Zitzmann

1986

George Mason’s first robot named R B5 X graces the cover of an early alumni magazine.

Photo by Office of University Branding

2010–2014

RoboPatriots take on the world in international competitions. Read more about them.

Photo by Alexis Glenn

2015

Erica Cohen, MEd ’15, uses a VGo robot to attend the College of Education and Human Development’s degree celebration while she is at her child’s graduation 250 miles away.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

2018

Mechanical engineering students build a robot called Thunder Rat to inspect campus storm drains. Read more about Thunder Rat.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

2019

Computer engineering students design and build a robotic fish called Bumblebee for their capstone design project. Here Bumblebee goes for a test swim in Mason Pond. Pictured from left, George Mason students Sergio Cruz and Morteza Eskandari, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Feitian Zhang, and student Blazej Horyza.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

2019

Starship robots begin rolling out for food delivery on Fairfax ��.

Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

2023

Patriot Pilots showcase their autonomous lighter-than-air robotic vehicles.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

2023

George Mason student Ze Li (right) built this autonomous surface water robot from scratch using CAD modeling and 3D printed materials. The robot is seen here in the pond at the Potomac Science Center. Learn more about this project.

Photo provided

2024

From left, computer science PhD student Rezoan Ahmed Nazib, computer science professor Parth Pathak, and computer science PhD student Ahmad Kamari with a rescue robot that can "see" through smoke and fog. Learn more about their work.

Code, Compassion, and Competition: George Mason's Robots Are on a Mission

Colleen Rich — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 14:44:22 +0000

Code, Compassion, and Competition: George Mason's Robots Are on a Mission Colleen Rich Fri, 09/12/2025 - 10:44

At ��, we love our robots. You can’t visit the Fairfax �� without seeing a robot roll by. We even made the national news by being the first U.S. university to use Starship robots for food delivery.

But George Mason’s affinity for robots and robotics goes far beyond having a pizza or a latte delivered to a dorm room. Our students and faculty are building and training autonomous robots for a variety of purposes and studying how humans and machines interact to better understand what it means to use and even depend on these technologies.

Cross-disciplinary research centers, such the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center, the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnerships, and the Applied Psychology and Autonomous Systems (ALPHAS) Lab, are just a few of the units across the university tackling this work and including students in the research.

These stories provide a snapshot of some of the work currently taking place.

Drones and Rovers to the Rescue

As the saying goes, if you love something, set it free. If it maps an area, finds a target, delivers a package, and comes back, the trophy is yours forever. Or something like that.

George Mason's team competed in the Raytheon Autonomous Vehicle Competition for the second year. As the reigning champs, they had a lot to prove.

Read the full story >>

Deception and Human-Robot Interactions

How likely are humans to trust a robot, especially if that robot has the capacity to lie? This is the question �� psychology doctoral candidate Andres Rosero is exploring in his research.

“This study is one of two that examine moral norms in robots and how in breaking these moral norms, humans accept and justify the robot's behaviors,” explains Rosero.

Read the full story >>

Take a photographic journey through the history of robots at �� >>

George Mason PhD student looks at deception and human-robot interactions

Colleen Rich — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:20:46 +0000

George Mason PhD student looks at deception and human-robot interactions Colleen Rich Thu, 02/13/2025 - 09:20

How likely are humans to trust a robot, especially if that robot has the capacity to lie? This is the question �� psychology doctoral candidate Andres Rosero is exploring in his research on human-robot interaction.

“As robots become more integrated in human society, their roles will transition into those of a collaborative nature rather than as tools used by people,” said Rosero, who works in Applied Psychology and Autonomous Systems (ALPHAS) Lab in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Program. “In response, these robots must be programmed with enough social awareness to navigate complex interpersonal interactions to build relationships and maintain a positive interaction with the humans they share their environment with.”

Almost 500 participants took part in Rosero's study “Human perceptions of social robot deception behaviors: an exploratory analysis,” which he conducted with George Mason graduate teaching assistant Harris Kelly and psychology professor Elizabeth Phillips. This study gauges how likely participants are to accept a lie told by a robot in various situational contexts and is one of the three manuscripts that comprise Rosero's dissertation.

Participants ranked specific scenarios involving robot deception and evaluated how deceptive the lie was, whether they approved of the robot’s actions, and if the robot’s behavior could be justified. The study placed these scenarios into three different environments: medical, domestic, and retail.

“The goal is to examine human perceptions of AI and robot collaborations across different complex social interactions,” explains Rosero, who received an MA in psychology from George Mason in 2022. “This study is one of two that examine moral norms in robots and how in breaking these moral norms, humans accept and justify the robot's behaviors.”

Each environment presented a unique quandary for the participant. For example, in the medical environment, the robot lied to a patient with Alzheimer’s, telling the patient that her deceased husband was coming home. In the other environments, the robot was evasive rather than uttering false statements.

George Mason PhD candidate Andres Rosero, pictured here with "Pepper," is exploring deception and human-robot interactions. Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

In the domestic environment, the robot did not reveal to the individual that they were being secretly filmed. And in the retail environment, the robot did not disclose that it was capable of completing an assigned task and didn’t require human assistance. Overall, participants widely believed the robot’s lie in the first scenario, but once the robot’s capacity for deception and manipulation was revealed, they became less trusting. They also were more likely to say that the robot’s behavior in the medical environment was justified than in the other two scenarios.

“Any technology that is designed with the intention of being utilized by people is an intersection of that technology and the humanities,” said Rosero. “Our challenge as psychologists is to design experiments that properly explore this interaction to provide direction to the development of these technologies in the real world.”

Technology’s ability to potentially conceal its true capabilities remains a concern of Rosero, as a focus on human-robot dynamics continues to fuel his research. "I am planning on defending my dissertation in the summer, and I am hoping to continue doing human factors research,” says Rosero. “My goal is to conduct impactful research that can assist people in their interactions with cutting-edge technology.”

When offering advice to students in an age of artificial intelligence and its advancements, Rosero recommends understanding “the practical applications of your work.”

“As an applied psychologist, one of the most important questions I ask myself is how my research can be applied in the real world,” he said. “It is important to understand how your work helps to build upon the current knowledge of the field and how it could impact the development of the larger technology in society.”

Learn more about AI research at George Mason

Advancing sensor tech for foggy situations

Nathan Kahl — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:15:50 +0000

Advancing sensor tech for foggy situations Nathan Kahl Mon, 01/13/2025 - 08:15

Devices that rely on sensors to accurately navigate and perceive the world around them are more and more commonplace, from drones to autonomous vehicles to ground robots on rescue missions. Parth Pathak, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at ��, is working to ensure the sensors have 20/20 vision.

From left, Rezoan Ahmed Nazib, Parth Pathak, and Ahmad Kamari with a rescue robot that can "see" through smoke and fog. Photo provided

Pathak received $660K in funding from the Army Research Office (ARO) for this work, some of which is done in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, where he did his post-doc.

“Conventional sensors rely on cameras or LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to pursue objects around them, but they don't work very well when there's smoke, fog, or generally a visually degraded environment,” said Pathak. “But the mmwave wireless radar sensors that we are working on don't get affected by that. If there is dirt on the sensor, well, that's okay. They can see through things and see around things."

Imagine a rescue robot going into a building filled with smoke, trying to navigate with little to no visibility, Pathak said. "These wireless sensors can enable them to perceive the environment and even self-localize without cameras, LiDARs, or other positioning systems.”

Another positive aspect of the devices is that while they can sense…they don’t sense too much, which is important for privacy concerns. The disadvantage, of course, is that when a sensor depicts an object such as a car, the resolution is not particularly good, and the images are “noisy.” Pathak is not just improving navigation and perception, but using multiple robots, for example, cooperatively. In a rescue mission, a swarm of robots can share their data, allowing them to collectively “see” a better picture.

Photo provided

“They can self-localize based on what they see, like how our brains work. But the robots only have wireless sensors to rely on, so part of the work is developing very good signatures of what they see from these very low resolution and noisy images,” said Pathak. “We can build 3D models of a room by scanning it through the wireless sensors and using machine learning to capture and recreate every minute detail. This is something that these sensors were never designed for. We are developing custom-tailored deep learning models of wireless sensing, essentially pushing the limits of what they can perceive using wireless signals.”

In addition to the research, ARO’s funding also supports testbed-to-prototype development and solution evaluation.

Pathak and colleagues published this research at the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM Mobicom conference and have submitted it to other conferences for potential publication. Two PhD students from his team, Ahmed Kamari and Rezoan Ahmed Nazib, are working actively on the project, along with three high school students who participated in prototyping over the summer as part of George Mason's Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program.

Connect with Computer Science at ��

In This Story

Parth Pathak

Science and engineering meet to create new surface water robot

Sarah Holland — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:35:06 +0000

Science and engineering meet to create new surface water robot Sarah Holland Tue, 10/17/2023 - 09:35

In his research on freshwater systems in the DC/Virginia area, �� College of Science professor R. Christian Jones was spending much of his time hauling boats. Too much, he thought.

McCue and Li with the autonomous surface water vehicle. Photo by Evan Cantwell/��.

“In order to take a sample from a pond,” he said, “I would need to haul a boat in, put the equipment in, launch it, and then bring it all back. It would add at least an hour and required the body of water to have an access point for a boat.”

As the director of Mason’s Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center (PEREC), Jones knew of a colleague who also works at the Potomac Science Center (PSC) where PEREC is housed, and who could help with this conundrum. He approached College of Engineering and Computing professor Leigh McCue and undergraduate student Ze Li with an idea: a machine that could go out on the pond, skim for plankton samples and collect water samples, and return to shore—all while the researcher remains on land.

This project is part of a larger grant from the National Science Foundation for Persistent and Accessible Maritime Monitoring (PAMM), of which McCue is the lead investigator. The multiyear grant—awarded in 2022 for more than $500,000—focuses on increasing educational, research, and robotics operations and development for students ranging from sixth grade to graduate level, in order to improve the applications of and expanded the use of unmanned marine vehicles. It also includes making such vehicles more accessible for individuals with motion limitations, which in turn can increase accessibility for all researchers.

“Researchers around the globe are utilizing robotics to conduct maritime research, which is an increasingly critical field of study,” explained McCue. “Through this grant, we’re developing more affordable maritime research tools to improve access for great science, whether citizen science or research-grade science. This project fit nicely into that mission.”

The autonomous surface water device created by Li this summer was built from scratch using CAD modeling and 3D printed materials. Li’s experience working with robotics through extracurriculars like his job with Starship Technologies—the company that manages the famous food robots seen rolling around campus—and the Mason Innovation Exchange’s (MIX) 3D printing training helped him navigate the challenges of creating this brand-new machine.

"We thought it was more beneficial to create something new by developing our design around an open-source hull model," Li said. “There’s more opportunity for us to iterate on the prototype.”

The team hopes to continue to improve the machine’s design, now that it’s being field-tested by Jones: improved autonomous capabilities and controls are both on the short list of potential improvements. Li also sees a potential for expanded testing of such data points as water temperature, turbidity, and salinity.

Jones predicts that this machine will be a boon for both access and efficiency. “The number of accessible ponds will increase dramatically with this, and we’ll be able to sample up to eight in a day instead of just one or two,” Jones said.

The machine will also allow for more immediate responses to sudden, unpredictable, and time-sensitive events, like taking samples immediately after storms. Jones even sees possible uses for this machine to take samples during major pollution events, keeping the researchers safe from exposure to harmful chemicals while still acquiring necessary data.

Jones emphasized that this project was made possible by the collaboration between the two colleges. “At a place like PSC where we’re all working together, seeing each other's labs and hearing about research, this sort of collaboration comes naturally,” he said. “It’s a beautiful opportunity for us all to become better researchers and do better science.”

Jones, McCue, and Li outside PSC. Photo by Evan Cantwell/��.

In This Story

Leigh McCue-Weil

Learn more about PEREC and its research

Design your own creations at the MIX

When robots meet sumo wrestling

Tama Moni — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 17:50:52 +0000

When robots meet sumo wrestling Tama Moni Mon, 04/25/2022 - 13:50

See Our Battlebots in Action

Systems Engineering students at the Norwalk Havoc Combat League on March 26.

From left to right: Rashed Almazrouei, Brian Romero, Nicholas Lechner, and

Sean Becker (team lead).

Battlebots is a nationally televised competition where robots battle in a closed arena. It is a breathtaking spectacle with robots colliding at high speeds and sparks flying. The winning robot must get a high score by hitting the opponent multiple times and pushing the opponent around the arena.

An enterprising team of Systems Engineering students in their Senior Design Capstone course designed, built, and tested a remotely controlled robot to compete in the 12-pound division in the Norwalk Havoc Robot Combat League (NHRL).

“The competition is unbelievably thrilling. The tension in the maintenance and repair bay preparing for the duel is high. Then you put your robot in the arena, and your heart is pumping at 120 beats per minute. Sparks flying, fans cheering. Whew!” said Brian Romero, a Systems Engineering student.

The team, led by nationally ranked combat robotics builder and Systems Engineering student Sean Becker says: “In the Systems Engineering class, we conducted a detailed analysis of the alternative attacking and defending mechanisms that are mounted on the robots.” The team built a Monte Carlo simulation and played out bouts between robots with different attack and defense mechanisms. “Based on the simulation, we came up with a unique design that attacks the opponent where they are least protected,” explained Sean Becker.

“We also took a step back and conducted a thorough design and analysis of the Life-cycle of a robot in the competition,” explained Systems Engineering student Nicholas Lechner. “This led us to realize the importance of modularity in the robot design.” Teams can have only 20 minutes between bouts to disassemble the robot and replace malfunctioning parts. “If you have ever watched a Battlebot fight, you know how much damage is done,” says Nicholas.

The team developed CAD designs and ran a Finite Elements Analysis on the components. The team fabricated the components, assembled, and tested the robot. “We broke a lot of components in testing and had to go back to the drawing board to redesign over and over again,” explained Sean Becker. “I never really appreciated the importance of testing, testing, testing,” says Brian Romero.

“We also practiced and timed the maintenance and repair to be ready for the competitions,” says Systems Engineering student Rashed Almazrouei. “It is like a Formula One race car pit stop. The parts and tools have to be lined up, and everyone has a specific role. The interaction has to be choreographed perfectly,” Rashed explained.

The team drove up to Norwalk, Connecticut, to compete in the Norwalk Havoc Robot Combat League on March 26, 2022. The robot won four six bouts and finished third overall.

“As systems engineers, and by applying the systems engineering methods, we had a big advantage over the competition,” says Sean Becker. “The Life-cycle analysis and the attack-defense simulation reduced the time and costs by learning in the digital world, what we would have to learn by competing in ten competitions.”

“We would like to thank all our professors in the Systems Engineering department for sharing their wisdom with us,” says Rashed. “Also, your encouragement, support, and belief in us as engineers made a big difference,” says Nicholas.

They are not out of the tournament yet. Since succeeding in the 12-pound class, the team is raising funding and applying to the 250-pound class Battlebot competition, which will premiere on the Discovery Channel.

To learn more about Systems Engineering, Robotics, and the Battlebot team, contact Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department Chair John Shortle.

Topics

Mason Engineering students and faculty compete at 99 Luftballoons competition

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:02:30 +0000

Mason Engineering students and faculty compete at 99 Luftballoons competition Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/08/2021 - 12:02

Left to right: Dinesh Karri, Robert Hooks, and Joseph Matthew Prince getting ready to compete at the Luftballoons competition at Indiana University.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) robotic shark blimp, which is what a team of �� students and faculty used to participate in the 99++ Luftballoons Competition at Indiana University on November 9 through 13.

The competition took place at the Indiana University Bloomington campus where people from Mason, the University of California Los Angeles, Indiana University at Bloomington, Pennsylvania State University, the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Surface Warfare Center – Crane Division, and the Army Research Laboratory competed in an aerial soccer match using remote-controlled LTA robots.

“LTA robots don’t need any support to hold them in the air. Helicopters need propellers, but all LTA robots can stay in the air on their own. Instead, they need controls to move them about in the air,” says Mason graduate student and competition teammate Joseph Prince Mathew.

Each team had defenders and seekers to protect their goal and score points against the other team. “It got pretty competitive,” says Dinesh Karri, another team member. “But it was so much fun.”

Every team played each other, and the teams with the most points faced off at the end of the five-day event. “Unfortunately, we lost, but we had the most points overall throughout the week,” says Mathew.

Mathew and Karri were working with Assistant Professor Feitian Zhang to develop an underwater glider as part of their PhD studies when they found out about the opportunity to bring their skills to the air. “It was a change of medium, from underwater to air. The dynamics are pretty similar,” says Mathew.

Robert Hooks, a junior undergraduate electrical engineering major, jumped on the project because of his interest in robotics and autonomous systems. “When I heard about it from one of my professors, I was very intrigued. It was a valuable and fun experience to learn hands-on,” says Hooks.