Learning robotics and AI made tangible, accessible, and fun!

Learning robotics and AI: robot autonomy

Learning robotics and AI is hard. Originating at MIT, Duckietown is a platform that streamlines creating, delivering and consuming cutting-edge robotics and AI learning experiences.

We offer teaching resources to instructors, hands-on activities to learners, an accessible research platform to researchers, and a state-of-the-art ecosystem for professional training.

We believe the world needs more talent to shape the next generations of robot autonomy.

We know that talent is you.

Duckietown users learning robotics and AI worldwide

Universities
220 +
Companies
150 +
Countries
66

How learning robotics and AI is done in Duckietown

The Duckietown project: from MIT to everyone

Duckietown started as a class at MIT in 2016 and is now a worldwide initiative to realize a new vision for AI and robotics education: state-of-the-art, hands-on, and for all.

The Duckietown technical infrastructure is maintained and developed by Duckietown, Inc., a Boston-based company. 

The pedagogical platform: a minimal autonomy ecosystem

Duckietown has many components that work together to provide joyful learning experiences. The most tangible is the hardware: Duckiebots and Duckietowns.

Duckiebots are low-cost mobile robots that are built almost entirely from off-the-shelf parts.

Duckietowns are the urban environments: roads, constructed from exercise mats and tape, and the signage that the robots use to navigate around. Duckietowns can be transformed into smart cities (“Autolabs”) by adding traffic lights and watchtowers.

A DB21 Duckietown in a Duckietown equipped with Autolab infrastructure.

Duckietown for teaching

The Duckietown platform was designed as part of a university AI robotics curriculum.

It has been used in prestigious universities, such as MIT, ETH Zürich, Université de Montréal, and many more.

We offer a “class-in-a-box” that comprises lectures, exercises, theory, hardware, automatic evaluations, support, and more – that combine simulation with the physical robot platform to reinforce the core concepts.

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Duckietown for learning robotics and AI

Makademics (makers + academics) are people who want to learn robotics and AI and build on their own, and also want a deep understanding of how things are working.

We want to allow everybody to learn AI and robotics even if they are not at elite institutions like MIT and ETH Zürich.

With Duckietown you can build your own robot, follow along with our lectures and interact with a global community of learners.

Learning robotics and AI like the professionals with Ubuntu, ROS and Docker

Duckietown for research

Learning robotics and AI is not only for students. Duckietown has been used extensively for research on mobile robotics and physically embodied AI systems, with Autolabs providing accessible means for reproducible research. 

You might be interested in the papers about Duckietown, and learning about the AI Driving Olympics.

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