Category: editor-choiche
Duckietown to join the UK Permanent Science Museum Collection!
Boston, October 2023: several Duckietown objects officially joined the Science Museum Group permanent Collection: the United Kingdom’s national archive of science, technology, engineering, and medicine!
Quick links
Duckietown joins UK's Science Museum Group Collection
In 2019, the Science Museum of London picked up on the project and included Duckietown items: a Duckiebot (DB19), a segment of Duckietown, and a Duckietown traffic light, in their “Driverless: Who is in control?” exhibition.
Following the success of this exhibition, the Board of Directors of the Science Museum started considering including the DUckietown items in the permanent collection of their institution.
We are proud to announce that, in August 2023, these Duckietown items have officially joined the Science Museum Group Collection – the UK’s national collection of science, technology, engineering and medicine.
Duckietown in the history books
Joining the permanent collection will:
“ensure that the items – as rare and representative objects – are acquired, conserved, preserved and stored in order that they may be accessible to current and future generations for interpretation, loans to other institutions, research, education, and sometimes display in temporary or permanent exhibitions.”
here are some details:
2023-216 | E2019.0205.1 | Duckiebot – small autonomous robot from Duckietown Project, 2018-2019 |
2023-222 | E2019.0205.2 | Traffic light kit from Duckietown Project, 2018-2019 |
2023-502 | E2019.0205.3 | City expansion pack from Duckietown Project, 2018-2019 |
Exploring the skies at the summer Duckiedrone academy
Boston, 7-11 July 2023: Congratulations to the fourth cohort of students of the Duckiedrone summer academy, hosted by Massrobotics, Brown University and Duckietown with the generous support of Amazon Robotics!
Exploring the skies at the summer Duckiedrone academy
As the sun shines high, the summer Duckiedrone academy, a program which sees the cooperation of Duckietown, Amazon Fulfillment Technology and Robotics, MassRobotics and Brown University, has attracted high school students from the greater Boston area to dive into the world of autonomous aerial vehicles.
The Duckiedrone is a DIY, open, Raspberry Pi-based quadcopter kit designed for introducing learners to autonomous flight. Comes with a polished undergraduate-level course and the support of the Duckietown international community.
Students learned how to build, program, and fly a drone starting from a box of components, in addition to participating in workshops held by industry professionals such as Stephanie Tellex, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, and Andrea Francesco Daniele, Chief Technology Officer at Duckietown.
In recent years autonomous robots have started revolutionizing many industries, and drones are playing an important role in this ongoing trend with applications from agriculture to inspection, surveillance, and warehouse management.
These versatile flying machines are a gateway to the fundamentals of robot autonomy, especially (but not only!) for younger learners. Seeing a machine fly on its own is exciting!
The Duckiedrone comes with step-by-step instructions for assembly, calibration, manual and autonomous operations. Students learn from the basics of mechatronics, such as soldering and handling of electrical circuits, to elements of autonomy including sensor calibration, middlewares (ROS), PID control, online filtering and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using Python and interactive Jupyter notebooks.
Learn more about Duckietown
The Duckietown platform enables state-of-the-art robotics and AI learning experiences.
It is designed to help teach, learn, and do research: from exploring the fundamentals of computer science and automation to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
Join the new “Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown” MOOC
Join the self-driving cars with Duckietown MOOC user-paced edition
Over 7200 learners engaged in a robotics and AI learning adventure with “Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown”, the first massive online open course (MOOC) on robot autonomy with hardware, hosted on the edX platform.
Kicking off on November 29th, this new edition is a user-paced course with rich and engaging modules offering a grand tour of real-world robotics, from computer vision to perception, planning, modeling, control, and machine learning, released all at once!
With simulation and real-world learning activities, learners can touch with hand the emergence of autonomy in their robotic agents with approaches of increasing complexity, from Brateinberg vehicles to deep learning applications.
We are thrilled to welcome you to the start of the second edition of Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown.
This is a new learning experience in many different ways, for both you and us. While the course is self-paced, the instructors and staff, as well as your peer learners and the community of those that came before you are standing behind, ready to intervene and support your efforts at any time.
Learn autonomy hands-on by making real robots take their own decisions and accomplish broadly defined tasks. Step by step from the theory, to the implementation, to the deployment in simulation as well as on Duckiebots.
Leverage the power of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano-powered Duckiebot to see your algorithms come to life!
MOOC Factsheet
- Name: Self-driving cars with Duckietown
- Platform: edX
- Cost: free to attend
- Instructors: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Université de Montréal (UdM), Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC)
Prerequisites
- Basic Linux, Python, Git
- Elements of linear algebra, probability, calculus
- Elements of kinematics, dynamics
- Computer with native Ubuntu installation
- Broadband internet connection
What you will learn
- Computer Vision
- Robot operations
- Object Detection
- Onboard localization
- Robot Control
- Planning
- Reinforcement Learning
The Duckietown robotic ecosystem was created at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in 2016 and is now used in over 175 universities worldwide.
“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.”
Enroll now and don’t miss the chance to join in the first vehicle autonomy MOOC with hands-on learning!
When rubber duckies meet the road: an interview with Prof. Liam Paull
UdM, Montréal, May 5, 2022: Liam Paull, professor at the University of Montreal and one of Duckietown’s founders, talks about his role and experiences with Duckietown.
When rubber duckies meet the road: an interview with Prof. Liam Paull
Liam Paull, professor at the University of Montreal in Quebec, and one of the very founders of Duckietown, shares below his unique perspective about Duckietown’s journey and its origin.
Good morning, Liam.
Hello.
Thank you very much for accepting to have this little chat.
Could you tell us something about you?
Sure. So my name is Liam Paull. I’m a professor at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. I teach in the computer science Department, And I do research on robotics.
Ok and when was the first time you “came across” Duckietown?
Well, I’m actually one of the creators of Duckietown, So I didn’t come across it as much! The origin story of Duckietown is kind of interesting, But I probably forgot some of the details. It must have been about 2015. And myself, Andrea Censi, and a few others were interested to get more teaching experience. We were all postdocs or research scientists at MIT at the time. I guess we started brainstorming ideas, and then roughly around that time, I switched positions at MIT. I was previously a postdoc in John Leonard’s group working on marine robotics, and then I switched to become part of Danielle Lerous lab and lead an autonomous driving project. And so somehow the stars just aligned. That the right topic for this class that we would teach would be autonomous driving. Yeah, the Ducky thing is kind of a separate thing. Actually, Andrea had started this other thing that was making videos for people to publicize their work at a top robotics conference Called the international conference robotics automation, and somehow had the idea that every single video that was submitted should have a rubber Ducky in it. And this was for scale or something.
There was some kind of reason behind it I sort of forget. But anyway, so the branding kind of caught fire.
When we were building the class, we agreed the one constraint was that there should be duckies involved somehow, and the rest is kind of history!
"I believe that there's a lot of interesting research directions that come from a standardized, small scale, accessible autonomous driving platform like Duckietown."
Liam Paull
Anything else you would like to add about Duckietown and it’s uses?
I didn’t mention specifically about the MOOC. One of the core missions of this project from the onset has been that it’s accessible. Both in terms of hardware but also in terms of software. And part of what that means to us Is that no matter where you are, no matter who you are, you should be able to get the hardware and you should be able to use the educational resources to learn. And part of the motivation for that Was that we saw that while we were at MIT. When you’re at a place like MIT you are extremely privileged and if you come from a background of less privilege, you see the discrepancy. In some sense, it’s palpable. Part of that, I guess, was that we don’t even necessarily want it to be a prerequisite that students should be enrolled in universities in order to be able to address the platform. So we built this massive online open source course through edx, which is also an open source provider Where people can, regardless of their background or regardless of their situation, they can sign up for this thing, and it’s a creative set of materials that also have exercises to interact with the robot that anybody can do, Regardless of whether they’re at a University or not.
I think this is the next step for us in making the platform accessible to all, and we’re going to continue to run iterations of this thing. But I also think that this is an exciting objective that very much fits in the mission of what we’re trying to do with this project.
This was great thank you for your time!
Awesome. Great. Thank you for your time. Bye.
Learn more about Duckietown
The Duckietown platform offers robotics and AI learning experiences.
Duckietown is modular, customizable and state-of-the-art. It is designed to teach, learn, and do research: from exploring the fundamentals of computer science and automation to pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
Tell us your story
Are you an instructor, learner, researcher or professional with a Duckietown story to tell? Reach out to us!
EdTech awards 2021: Duckietown finalist in 3 categories!
Duckietown reaches the finals in the EdTech Awards 2021
The EdTech awards are the largest and most competitive recognition program in all of education technology.
The competition, led by the EdTech digest, recognizes the biggest names in edtech – and those who soon will be, by identifying all over the world the products, services and people that bet promote education through the use of technology, for the benefit of learners.
The 2021 edition has brought a big surprise to Duckietown, as it was nominated as a finalist in 3 different categories:
- Cool Tool Award: as robotics (for learning, education) solution;
- Cool Tool Award: as higher education solution;
- Trendsetter Award: as a product or service setting a trend in education technologies.
Although a final is just a starting point, we are proud of the hard work done by the team in this particularly difficult year of pandemic and lockdowns, and grateful to you all for the incredible support, constructive feedback and contributions!
(hidden) Want to learn more about us?
Duckietown and NVIDIA work together for accessible AI and robotics education: Meet the NVIDIA powered Duckiebot
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.”
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 March 2021 on edX. You can find more information about the MOOC here.