The Duckietown Foundation
The Duckietown Foundation is the non-profit foundation which develops and promotes the Duckietown project.
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Our mission
Our mission is to make the world excited about the beauty, the fun, the importance, and the challenges of robotics and AI, through learning experiences that are tangible, accessible, and inclusive.
We achieve this mission by designing freely-available robotics platforms and curricula for all levels of education, and promoting its use in the world.
Read below to know our philosophy.
Robotics and AI
Beauty
Fun
Importance
Challenges
The beauty and the fun
AI and robotics are the most beautiful disciplines – it’s mankind’s attempt at creating artificial creatures that think and act like us.
And it’s fun, seeing robots go!
The importance and the challenges
AI and robotics will change our world. Everybody should understand the possibilities, the current status, and how much is left to do.
Learning experiences
Tangible
Accessible
Inclusive
Experiences
While most of our activity results in the development of a hardware and software platform, the platform is only a means to an end: we care about the experience that is enabled by the platform.
Tangible
We believe that to learn robotics you have to be able to touch one. You learn by touching and doing.
We try to join the maker spirit with the academic spirit: the experiences are fun, but there is also a path towards more academic learning.
Accessible
We strive to design a hardware/software platform that is inexpensive and easily reproducible.
Inclusive
We wish to promote the broad understanding of the effects of AI/robotics in society and we want to reach previously underserved demographics.
The story of Duckietown
The Duckietown project was conceived in 2016 as a graduate class at MIT. A group of over 15 Postdocs and 5 professors were involved in the initial development.
The goal was to build a platform that was small-scale and cute yet still preserved the real scientific challenges inherent in a full-scale real autonomous robot platform.
Here is the very first lecture for Duckietown in 2016:
The first demo
The first class had 24 students and culminated with a year-end demo in a full sized hockey rink. There were over 3000 visitors.
Going global
After the 2016 class, many of the key organizers left MIT for other opportunities.
In the meantime, all of the pieces of the experience (the slides, the demos, the platform, the software) were made openly available and other institutions began to take interest.
The platform has since been used at several universities around the globe, including NCTU in Taiwan, Tsinghua in China, and RPI in the United States among many others.
The joint class of 2017
In the Fall of 2017, Liam Paull (Montréal), Andrea Censi (ETHZ), Matthew Walter (TTIC) and Hsueh-Cheng Wang (NCTU) decided to teach an official coordinated edition of the class. In this version, students from classes at ETH Zürich, Université de Montréal, and TTI Chicago and NCTU worked collaboratively in groups that spanned continents.
The result was a coordinated global demo that showcased the students’ achievements.
Present and future
The 2018 Kickstarter
We wanted to expand the use of Duckietown dramatically.
To achieve this, we needed to make the Duckietown platform cheaper, easier to obtain and able to provide more learning experiences and opportunities for performing cutting edge research.
To achieve this objective we launched a successful kickstarter campaign and we now have an easier way for people to acquire the hardware.
The AI Driving Olympics
The Duckietown Foundation debuted the AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO), a competition focused on AI for self-driving cars, in December 2018 at the premiere machine learning conference: Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS) in Montreal. It was the first competition to ever take place at a machine learning conference with real robots.
AI-DO2 will be held at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May 2019.
What’s Next?
The Duckietown Project is an ever-evolving organism. We are continually looking for ways to improve and accomplish our mission. We are always looking for motivated individuals who want to help us grow. If you use Duckietown for teaching or research and want to contribute please get in touch.
Our Team
Volunteer staff
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Liam Paull (Université de Montréal) coordinates operations and strategy. |
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Andrea Censi (ETH Zürich, nuTonomy) coordinates software development and technical infrastructure. |
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Jacopo Tani (ETH Zürich) coordinates hardware development and distribution. |
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Kirsten Bowser Duckietown community organizer. |
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Matt Walter coordinates the Duckietown Junior effort. |
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Nick Wang leader of the Duckiepond initiative. |
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Stefanie Tellex leader of the Duckietown Air
Senior advisors |
Thank you to our generous benefactors
Supporters
donations of $100 or more
Jaan Kittask
Sally Janson Cooke
Massimo Gatti
Defenders
donations of $500 or more
Patrons
donations of $1000 or more
Emilio Frazzoli
Duckietown Foundation
6 Liberty Square
PMB #217
Boston, MA 02109