A Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) professor may someday be knowm as the man who freed the robots. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but NPS Professor of Mechanical and Astronautical Engineering (MAE) I Michael Ross has just won two coveted National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Director's Innovation Initiative (DII) awards, and the more than $700,000 that goes along with them, to test applications of his revolutionary theory that, to be effective, autonomous space vehicles need to be free...free of their human masters, that is.