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The Workshop on Benchmarking Progress in Autonomous Driving at IROS 2020

Posted on | by Liam Paull

The IROS 2020 Workshop on Benchmarking Autonomous Driving

Duckietown has also a science mission: to help develop technologies for reproducible benchmarking in robotics.  

The IROS 2020 Workshop on Benchmarking Autonomous Driving provides a platform to investigate and discuss the methods by which progress in autonomous driving is evaluated, benchmarked, and verified.

It is free to attend.

The workshop is structured into 4 panels around four themes. 

  1. Assessing Progress for the Field of Autonomous Driving
  2. How to evaluate AV risk from the perspective of real world deployment (public acceptance, insurance, liability, …)?
  3. Best practices for AV benchmarking
  4. Algorithms and Paradigms

The workshop will take place on Oct. 25, 2020 starting at 10am EDT. 

Invited Panelists

We have  a list of excellent invited panelists from academia, industry, and regulatory organizations. These include: 

  • Emilio Frazzoli (ETH Zürich / Motional)
  • Alex Kendall (Wayve)
  • Jane Lappin (National Academy of Sciences)
  • Bryant Walker Smith (USC Faculty of Law)
  • Luigi Di Lillo (Swiss Re Insurance), 
  • John Leonard (MIT)
  • Fabio Bonsignorio (Heron Robots)
  • Michael Milford (QUT)
  • Oscar Beijbom (Motional)
  • Raquel Urtasun (University of Toronto / Uber ATG). 

Please join us…

Please join us on October 25, 2020 starting at 10am EST for what should be a very engaging conversation about the difficult issues around benchmarking progress in autonomous vehicles.  

For full details about the event please see here.

Duckietown and NVIDIA work together for accessible AI and robotics education: Meet the NVIDIA powered Duckiebot

Posted on | by Ivano Marocchi

Duckietown and NVIDIA partnership for accessible AI and robotics education

NVIDIA GTC, October 6, 2020: Duckietown and NVIDIA align efforts to push the boundaries of accessible, state-of-the-art higher-education in robotics and AI. The tangible outcome is a brand new “Founder’s edition” Duckiebot, which will be broadly available from January 2021, powered by the new NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB platform.

Read the full NVIDIA announcement here.

Meet the NVIDIA powered Duckiebot

Autonomy is already changing the world. Duckietown and NVIDIA recognize the importance of hands-on education in robotics and AI to empower everybody today to understand and design the next generations of autonomy.

The result of this collaboration is a new NVIDIA powered Duckiebot, using the novel Jetson Nano 2GB board, that will enable local execution of machine learning agents in the Duckietown ecosystem. 

To celebrate this special occasion, the Duckiebot has been redesigned to include: new sensors (time of flight, IMU, encoders), a new custom-designed battery providing real time diagnostics (state of charge, remaining autonomy and other health metrics), and fun accessories like a screen to visualize key metrics. All of this while keeping the price accessible for anyone willing to experience the challenges of a real-life robotic ecosystem. 

A great team

“The new NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB is the ultimate starter AI computer for educators and students to teach and learn AI at an incredibly affordable price.” said Deepu Talla, Vice President and General Manager of Edge Computing at NVIDIA. “Duckietown and its edX MOOC are leveraging Jetson to take hands-on experimentation and understanding of AI and autonomous machines to the next level.”
“The Duckietown educational platform provides a hands-on, scaled down, accessible version of real world autonomous systems.” said Emilio Frazzoli,  Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich, “Integrating NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano power in Duckietown enables unprecedented access to state-of-the-art compute solutions for learning autonomy.”

Learn more

To know more about the technical specifications of the new NVIDIA powered Duckiebot, or to pre-order yours, visit the Duckietown project shop here.

The new Duckiebot will be also used in the “Self-driving Cars with Duckietown” Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) that will be held in early 2021 on edX. You can find more information about the MOOC here.

Round 3 of the the AI Driving Olympics is underway!

Posted on | by Liam Paull

The AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO) is back!

We are excited to announce the launch of the AI-DO 3, which will culminate in a live competition event to be held at NeurIPS this Dec. 13-14.

The AI-DO is a global robotics competition that comprises a series of events based on autonomous driving. This year there are three events, urban (Duckietown), advanced perception (nuScenes), and racing (AWS Deepracer).  The objective of the AI-DO is to engage people from around the world in friendly competition, while simultaneously benchmarking and advancing the field of robotics and AI. 

Check out our official press release.

  • Learn more about the AI-DO competition here.

If you've already joined the competition we want to hear from you! 

 Share your pictures on facebook and twitter. 

Duckietown Workshop at RoboCup Junior

Posted on | by Kirsten Bowser

Duckietown Workshop at RoboCup Junior

In collaboration with the RoboCup Federation, the Duckietown Foundation will be offering workshops at RoboCup 2019 in Sydney, Australia, providing a hands-on introduction to the Duckietown platform.

We will be hosting three one-day workshops as part of RoboCup 2019 from July 4-6, 2019  for teachers, students, and independent learners who are interested in finding out more about the Duckietown platform. Attendance is completely free and everyone is welcome to apply, even if you are not participating in RoboCup. There are no formal requirements, though basic familiarity with GNU/Linux and shell usage is recommended. 

If you would like to apply to attend a workshop, please complete this form. 

We will have Duckiebots and Duckietowns for participants to use. However, you are more than welcome to bring your own Duckiebots, available for purchase at https://get.duckietown.org. 

Congratulations to the winners of the second edition of the AI Driving Olympics!

Posted on | by Kirsten Bowser

Team JetBrains came out on top on all 3 challenges

It was a busy (and squeaky) few days at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Montreal for the organizers and competitors of the AI Driving Olympics. 

The finals were kicked off by a semifinals round, where we the top 5 submissions from the Lane Following in Simulation leaderboard. The finalists (JBRRussia and MYF) moved forward to the more complicated challenges of Lane Following with Vehicles and Lane Following with Vehicles and Intersections. 

Results from the AI-DO2 Finals event on May 22, 2019 at ICRA

If you couldn’t make it to the event and missed the live stream on Facebook, here’s a short video of the first run of the JetBrains Lane Following submission.

Thanks to everyone that competed, dropped in to say hello, and cheered on the finalists by sending the song of the Duckie down the corridors of the Palais des Congrès. 

A few pictures from the event

Don't know much about the AI Driving Olympics?

It is an accessible and reproducible autonomous car competition designed with straightforward standardized hardware, software and interfaces.

Get Started

Step 1: Build and test your agent with our available templates and baselines

Step 2: Submit to a challenge

https://challenges.duckietown.org

Check out the leaderboard

View your submission in simulation

Step 3: Run your submission on a robot

https://get.duckietown.org/

in a Robotarium

Round 2 of the the AI Driving Olympics is underway!

Posted on | by Kirsten Bowser

The AI-DO is back!

We are excited to announce that we are now ready to accept submissions for AI-DO 2, which will culminate in a live competition event to be held at ICRA 2019 this May 20-22.

The AI Driving Olympics is a global robotics competition that comprises a series of challenges based on autonomous driving. The AI-DO provides a standardized simulation and robotics platform that people from around the world use to engage in friendly competition, while simultaneously advancing the field of robotics and AI. 

Check out our official press release.

The finals of AI-DO 1 at NeurIPS, December 2018

We want to see your classical robotic and machine learning based algorithms go head to head on the competition track. Get started today!

Want to learn more or join the competition? Information and get started instructions are here.

If you've already joined the competition we want to hear from you! 

 Share your pictures on facebook and twitter. 

 Get involved in the community by:

asking for help

offering help

AI-DO I Interactive Tutorials

Posted on | by Liam Paull

The AI Driving Olympics, presented by the Duckietown Foundation with help from our partners and sponsors is now in full swing. Check out the leaderboard!

We now have templates for ROS, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, as well as an agnostic template.

We also have baseline implementation using the classical pipeline, imitation learning with data from both simulation and real Duckietown logs, and reinforcement learning.

We are excited to announce that we will be hosting a series of interactive tutorials for competitors to get started. These tutorials will be streamed live from our Facebook page.

See here for the full tutorial schedule.

The AI Driving Olympics at NIPS 2018

Posted on | by Liam Paull

Authors:

Andrea Censi Liam Paull, Jacopo Tani, Julian Zilly, Thomas Ackermann, Oscar Beijbom, Berabi Berkai, Gianmarco Bernasconi, Anne Kirsten Bowser, Simon Bing, Pin-Wei David Chen, Yu-Chen Chen, Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Breandan Considine, Andrea Daniele, Justin De Castri, Maurilio Di Cicco, Manfred Diaz, Paul Aurel Diederichs, Florian Golemo, Ruslan Hristov, Lily Hsu, Yi-Wei Daniel Huang, Chen-Hao Peter Hung, Qing-Shan Jia, Julien Kindle, Dzenan Lapandic, Cheng-Lung Lu, Sunil Mallya, Bhairav Mehta, Aurel Neff, Eryk Nice, Yang-Hung Allen Ou, Abdelhakim Qbaich, Josefine Quack, Claudio Ruch, Adam Sigal, Niklas Stolz, Alejandro Unghia, Ben Weber, Sean Wilson, Zi-Xiang Xia, Timothius Victorio Yasin, Nivethan Yogarajah, Yoshua Bengio, Tao Zhang, Hsueh-Cheng Wang, Matthew Walter, Stefano Soatto, Magnus Egerstedt, Emilio Frazzoli,

Published at RSS Workshop on New Benchmarks, Metrics, and Competitions for Robotic Learning

Link: Available here

The Duckiebots are ready to conquer the world!

Posted on | by Andrea Censi

Dear friends of Duckietown:

We are excited to bring you tremendous news about the Duckietown project.

In the past years we have had the support from many enthusiastic individuals who have donated their time and efforts to help the Duckietown project grow, and grown it has!

Duckietown started at MIT in 2016 – almost two years ago. Now Duckietown classes have been taught in 10 countries with more than 700 alumni.

The last months have been a transformative period for the project, as we prepare to jump to the next level in terms of scope and reach.

The Duckietown Foundation

We have established the Duckietown Foundation, a non-profit entity that will lead the Duckietown project.

Our mission: make the world excited about the beauty, the fun, the importance, and the challenges of robotics and artificial intelligence, through learning experiences that are tangible, accessible, and inclusive.

The Duckietown Foundation will serve as the coordination point for the development of Duckietown. As a non-profit, the foundation can accept donations from individuals and companies for the promotion of affordable and fun robotics learning programs around the world.

See: our mission, open volunteer positions, how to help us.

A Kickstarter

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We are organizing a Kickstarter to make it easier for people to obtain Duckiebots and Duckietowns.

This solves the biggest hurdle so on reproducing the Duckietown experience: the the lack of a one-click solution to acquire the hardware.

Also, working with thousands of pieces allows to drive down the price and to design our own custom boards.

See: Our Kickstarter

A donation program

As much as we aim to have affordable hardware, in certain parts of the world the only realistic price is $0.

That is why we have included a donate-a-Duckiebot and donate-a-class program through the Kickstarter.

Become a friend of Duckietown and support the distribution of low-cost and playful AI and robotics education to even more schools across the globe by backing our Kickstarter campaign.

For details about donating and receiving, see Donation program.

A new website…

We’ve designed a new website that better serves users of the platform by offering support forums and more organized access to the teaching materials.

See: The new forums.

See: New “duckumentation” site docs.duckietown.org

… and 700 more new websites

We want people to share their Duckietown experiences with other Duckie-enthusiasts, whether they be far or near. That’s now possible through upwards of  700 “community” subsites, each with a blog and a forum.

For more information, see the post Communities sites launched.

The AI Driving Olympics

In addition to its role as an education platform, Duckietown is a useful research tool.

We are happy to announce that Duckietown is the official platform for the AI Driving Olympics, a machine learning competition to be held at NIPS 2018 and ICRA 2019, the two largest machine learning and robotics conferences in the world. We challenge you to put your coding to the test and join the competition.

For everything about AI-DO, see AI-DO.duckietown.org.

That’s all for now! Thanks for listening –

The Duckietown project relies on an active and engaged community, which is why we want you to stay involved! Support robotics education and research –  Sign up on our website! Back our kickstarter! Compete in the AI Driving Olympics!

 

For any additional information of if you would like to help us in other ways, please see here for how to help us.