The Control, Intelligent Autonomy/Robots and Optimization Research Lab consists of both undergraduate and graduate students in electrical engineering and robotics under the supervision of Dr. Ningshi Yao in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, affiliated with Bio-engineering Department, at the George Mason University.
The research areas our group is actively engaged with are control theory, real-time scheduling, human-robot interaction/teaming, mixed integer optimization for resource allocation, bio-inspired robotics and autonomy, machine learning, and cyber-physical human systems.
You can also visit our youtube channel, GMU’s internal CIAOLab website, and LinkedIn page. Here are some highlight videos from our youtube channel.
Dr. Ningshi Yao is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, affiliated with Bio-engineering Department, at George Mason University. She received her PhD from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020, and the BS in Automatic Control from Zhejiang University, China, in 2014. Prior to joining Mason, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology from November 2020 to July 2021. Her research interests include real-time scheduling, control theory, cyber-physical systems, machine learning and human-robot interaction.
Our paper titled “From Dissensus to Consensus: Bias-Controlled Transition in Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics” by Rajul Kumar, and Dr. Ningshi Yao has been accepted by the 10th IFAC Conference on Networked Systems (NecSys 2025). Dr. Yao Read more…
Our paper entitled “Fuzzy and Neural Network Controllers for N-Trailers Wheeled Mobile Robots Avoiding Self-Collision and Actuator Saturation” by Pouya Kassaeiyan, Dr. Qi Wei, and Dr. Ningshi Yao has been accepted by the 2025 American Read more…
Dr. Yao will be a new member of the Conference Editorial Board (CEB) of the IEEE Control Systems Society. She will serve as Associate Editors for IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC2025) and American Read more…
Our paper entitled “From instantaneous schedulability to worst case schedulability: a significant moment approach” by Dr. Ningshi Yao with our collaborator Dr. Fumin Zhang has been published in Cyber-Physical System journal. Check out the paper Read more…
This summer, Ciao lab hosted 3 high-school interns ASSIP and 2 high-school student volunteers. The students worked on robotic blimp development and human robot interaction experiment and completed the summer project sucessfully.
The goal for “Recent Advancement of IndoorLight-Than-Air Agents Workshop”, organized by Dr. Ningshi Yao, Dr. Fumin Zhang and Dr. Donald Sofge, is to disseminate the latest breakthroughs in Light-Than-Air (LTA) agents, i.e., robotic blimps, within Read more…
3241, ENGR Building, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 22030
Email: nyao4 at gmu dot edu