Guide for researchers

Build a mobile robotics lab for accessible and reproducible research

I am a researcher

Duckietown is a modular, inexpensive research platform for studying autonomy in complex systems. 

Think of it as an “experimental simulator” which exposes the nuisances of the real world while preserving control over the environment.  

Value proposition

We provide a baseline implementation for you to rapidly and easily test your algorithms on real physical hardware.

  • Convenience: You can only change the part that interests you and use the rest of the baselines to have a fully functional system.
  • Reproducibility: Your research has a high impact since it uses a standard platform that others can easily replicate.
Duckietown research workflow

Example tools for research

  • Imitation learning template
  • Reinforcement learning template
  • Database of Duckiebot driving logs
  • Duckiebot driving simulator
  • Modularized code (ROS baseline template)
  • Low cost, standardized robots, and smart city environment
  • An international embodied AI competition infrastructure (AI-DO)
  • A community to bounce ideas off
  • A simulation-based system for robotic agent benchmarking
  • A physical system for reproducible agent benchmarking (Autolab)

Researcher: first steps

  1. Join the Duckietown community on Slack
  2. Learn about the capabilities of the platform
  3. Get the hardware

Reach out for additional information

Want to upgrade your Duckietown to Autolab and enable experimental evaluations locally, or have questions on how to bring Duckietown to your institution?

Reach out or request a formal quote here: