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Ciao Lab Leads to Launch the First Robotic Blimp Competition for Middle and High School Students
$1.17M NIH Grant Awarded to CIAO Lab for Eye Research
Airborne Robotic Blimp Competition for Middle and High School Students
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Ciao! Welcome to our lab!

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.

visit our youtube channel and linkedin page:

Faculty

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.

Sponsors

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Collaborators

Selected Videos

News

IFAC Open Journal Paper Acceptance

Our paper entitled “Dynamic modeling and integrated control framework for an eye-like robot with torsional–positional decoupling and Listing’s law enforcement” by Dr. Ningshi Yao with our collaborators Pouya Kassaeiyan, and Dr. Qi Wei has been accepted Read more…

CIAO Lab at RO-MAN 2026

Dr. Yao joined the organizing committee and serve as the Special Session Chair for the 35th IEEE RO-MAN 2026! She will also serve as an Associate Editor for RO-MAN2026. The conference will take place in Read more…

Contact us

Thanks for your interest in Ciao Lab. We are always looking for talented students and collaborators. Please feel free to send email to Dr. Yao or stop by at her office (Rm 166, Research Hall).

Address

Rm 166, Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC), Research Hall

001 York River Rd, Fairfax, VA, 22030

Email: nyao4 at gmu dot edu

Contact Us