Author: Andrea Censi

I am a researcher working at ETH Zürich.

AI-DO 5 competition Update

Posted on | by Andrea Censi

AI-DO 5 Update

AI-DO 5 is in full swing and we want to bring you some updates: better graphics, more maps, faster and more reliable backend and an improved GUI to submit to challenges! 

Challenges visualization

We updated the visualization. Now the evaluation produces videos with your name and evaluation number (as below).

Challenges updates

We fixed some of the bugs in the simulator regarding the visualization (“phantom robots” popping in and out). 

We updated the maps in the challenges to have more variety in the road network; we put more grass and trees to make the maps more joyful!

We have updated the maps with more trees and grass

Faster and more reliable backend

The server was getting slow given the number of submissions, and sometime the service was unavailable. We have revamped the server code and added some backend capacity to be more fault-tolerant. It is now much faster!

Thanks so much to the participants that helped us debug this problem!

We overhauled the server code to make it much faster!

More evaluators

We brought online many more CPU and GPU evaluators. We now encourage you to submit more often as we have a lot more capacity.

We have many more evaluators now!

Submit to testing challenges

We also remind you that the challenges on the front page are the validation challenges, in which everybody can see the output. However what counts for winning are the testing challenges!  

To do that you can use dts challenges submit with the –challenges option

Or, you can use a new way using the website that we just implemented, described below.

Submitting to other challenges

Step 1: Go to your user page, by clicking “login” and then going to “My Submissions”.

Step 2: In this page you will find your submissions grouped by “component”. 

Click the component icon as in the figure.

Step 3: The page will contain some buttons that allow you to submit to other challenges that you didn’t submit to yet.

Join the AI Driving Olympics

AI-DO technical updates

Posted on | by Andrea Censi

Here are some technical updates regarding the competition.

Thanks for all the bug reports via Github and Slack!

Changes to platform model in simulations

We have changed the purely kinematic model in the simulations with one that is more similar to the real robots obtained by system identification.

You can find the model here.

Properties:

  • The inputs to the model are the two PWM signals to the wheels, left and right. (not [speed, omega] like last year)
  • The maximum velocity is ~2 m/s. The rise time is about 1 second.
  • There is a simulated delay of 100 ms.

We will slightly perturb the parameters of the model in the future to account for robot-robot variations, but this is not implemented yet.

All the submissions have been re-evaluated. You can see the difference between the two models

purely kinematic platform model more realistic platform model

 

The new model is much more smooth. Overall we expect that the new model makes the competition easier both in simulation, and obviously, in the transfer.

Infrastructure changes

  • We have update the Duckietown Shell and commands several times to fix a few reported bugs.
  • We have started with provisioning AWS cloud evaluators. There are still sporadic problems. You should know that if your job fails with the host-error code, the system thinks it is a problem of the evaluator and it will try on another evaluator.

Open issues

  • Some timeouts are a bit tight. Currently we allow 20 minutes like for NeurIPS, but this year we have much more realistic simulation and better visualization code that  take more time. If your submission fails after 20 minutes of evaluation, this is the reason.
  • We are still working on the glue code for running the submissions on the real robots. Should be a couple of days away.
  • Some of the changes to the models/protocol above are not in the docs yet.

Update to challenge LF, LFV evaluation code

Posted on | by Andrea Censi
We are going to roll out an improvement to the LF and LFV challenges competitions. This change fixes the following problems:
  • The robot will always start in the right lane - a legal position.
  • The evaluation and visualization code are going to be richer, with more statistics plotted (example).
  • The evaluation rulebook is slightly changed to address a couple of bugs of how the metrics were computed.
What is going to happen is the following:
  • The moment that we update the evaluation code, all existing submissions are set back to the state of "evaluation".
  • The evaluators will then re-evaluate all of them. This will take 2-3 hours.
During this time the leaderboards are going to be blank, and slowly will re-populate as the evaluators do their job. (To speed up evaluation of your submissions, you can run dts challenges evaluator.)

Updated Duckietown-challenges server fixes speed problems; updated “dts commands evaluate”

Posted on | by Andrea Censi

As we have more participants, the Duckietown Challenges Server started to feel slow. The reason: we were a bit lazy and some pages had O(n) implementations where O(1) was needed - loading all challenges/submissions/etc.

We also updated the "dts challenges evaluate" command to be more robust. Please continue to report bugs as this part is fragile by nature --- running containers that spawn other containers on the user's machines.

Kicking off the Duckietown Donation program with Cali, Colombia

Posted on | by Andrea Censi
Our first donation of a class kit goes to Cali, Colombia.

We’ve reached our Kickstarter goal! 

This is great news because it means that we can kick off our donation program, with our first donation of a Class Kit, to students at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Cali, Colombia.

 

Why a donation program?

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics are the sciences of the future, which is why we want everyone to have the chance to play and learn with Duckietown. While we design our robot platform to be as inexpensive as possible, we realize that cost might be an obstacle for educators or students with limited resources.

That is why we have designed a donation program where individuals, organizations or companies can make Duckietown truly accessible to all. Everybody can support STEM education by donating Duckiebots, or an entire Class Kit, to deserving individuals or educators. 

Our first recipient

Our first recipient is Prof. Victor Romero Cano, a professor from the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Cali, Colombia. 

Victor has a Ph.D. in field robotics obtained at the University of Sydney, Australia. He teaches two courses at his institution,  and supervises over 40 undergraduate students who are working towards their final research projects.

 

 

Victor will teach two classes using the Duckietown platform. The first is an introductory class to robotics, covering kinematic analysis, teleoperation, control and autonomous navigation for wheeled robots. The second class is more specifically about robotic perception, and will go in detail about mapping and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), covering lane detection as well as object detection, recognition and tracking.

 

Victor’s first Duckietown class starts in January 2019. We welcome him to the community and look forward to hearing about his journey!

You can help us sponsor more donations by sponsoring our Kickstarter.

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.

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.

To learn more about how to support Duckietown, reach out to [email protected]. 

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.com

… 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.

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.