Guide for researchers

Use Duckietown to teach, learn, and do research.

I am a researcher

Vision

We designed Duckietown to be a modular, inexpensive research platform for studying autonomy in complex systems.

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

Value proposition

We provide a baseline implementation for you to be able 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. For maximum impact, compete in an AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO).

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 (AI-DO)
A community to bounce ideas off
A simulation-based system for robotic agent benchmarking
A physical system for reproducible agent benchmarking (Autolab)

Here is a partial list of published papers using Duckietown.

Researcher next steps

1. Join the Duckietown Slack
2. Learn about the AI Driving Olympics
3. Get the hardware

and start testing or training your algorithms with our templates, logs, and simulator.

Want to build a Duckietown Autolab and evaluate your agents locally, at your institution?

For any questions or doubts, do not hesitate to reach out!

Duckietown was much more than just a class, it was a hands-on deep dive into hardware, software, and systems integration, and, most of all, it was a blast!

The Duckietown class is the autonomous driving pie: the filling is hardcore robotics, the casing is artificial intelligence, and as a plus you get some funny ducks on top!

Teaching the Duckietown class was a wonderful experience for me and my students. The materials are great and the hands-on experience with the robot really helps reinforce the curriculum.