Tor Vergata University and Duckietown partner to deliver a hands-on control systems workshop at the EU Maker Faire Rome

Tor Vergata University and Duckietown deliver hands-on control systems workshop at EU Maker Faire Rome 2025

Posted on October 15, 2025 | by Duckietown Admin

Tor Vergata University and Duckietown deliver hands-on control systems workshop at EU Maker Faire Rome 2025

Tor Vergata University, Rome, Italy, delivered a hands-on educational workshop on control systems at the European Maker Faire 2025 that took place in Rome, Oct. 17-19, 2025, in partnership with Duckietown.

Hands-on workshop: Introduction to automatic control with self-driving cars

Tor Vergata University, Rome’s second University, in partnership with Duckietown, has delivered a workshop titled “Introduction to Automatic Control with Self-Driving Duckiebots” in occasion of the EU Maker Faire in Rome, which hosted nearly 50000 visitors over the span of three days.

The objective of the workshop was to introduce participants to the fundamental principles of control system engineering and vehicle autonomy, by using real and simulated Duckiebots, and investigating the real-world impact of “details” such as controller tuning.

In this workshop, tuned for makers, educators, and learners, participants have:

Learnt what a robot is and what all robots have in common;
Understood the role of feedback and control systems in vehicle autonomy, as well as other everyday technologies;
Explored sensors, actuators, and the perception pipeline of Duckiebots;
Tuned a PID controller on simulated and physical Duckiebots.

Learning automatic control: Who, where and when

The workshop, led by Professor Mario Sassano from the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Informatica of the Tor Vergata University, took place in three sessions at the European Maker Faire 2025 in Rome. Shima Akbari, Giorgio Manca and Davide Iafrate provided precious assistance:

Friday, October 17, 2025: from 13:00 to 14:30 CET, Room 2 Make Lab (Area A)

Saturday, October 18, 2025: from 12.30 to 14:00 CET, Room 2 Make Lab (Area A)

Sunday, October 19, 2025: form 13:00 to 16:00, Room 8 (Area J)

Maker Faire 2025 control systems workshop

Control Systems Workshop Speakers

Prof. Mario Sassano is Engineering Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy.

Shima Akbari is a Ph. D. student at Italian National Program in Autonomous Systems at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy.

Giorgio Manca is a Ph. D. Student in the DAuSy program at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy.

Jacopo Tani, Ph. D. is cofounder, President and CEO of Duckietown.

Prof. Liam Paull is Universitè de Montréal, CTO and cofounder at Duckietown.

Davide Iafrate is a Robotics EngineerDuckietown

About Duckietown

Duckietown is a platform for creating and disseminating robotics and AI learning experiences.

It is modular, customizable and state-of-the-art, and designed to teach, learn, and do research. From exploring the fundamentals of computer science and automation to pushing the boundaries of knowledge, Duckietown evolves with the skills of the user.

Duckietown at the European Maker Faire 2025 – Rome

Posted on October 14, 2025 | by Duckietown Admin

Duckietown at the European Maker Faire 2025 – Rome

Duckietown went to the European Maker Faire 2025 in Rome, a place where makers, innovators, and creatives from all over the world showcase
projects in electronics, artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual and
augmented reality, gaming, music, art, education, and much more.

Duckietown at the Maker Faire

Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition is an annual event, open to visitors, dedicated to innovation, technology, and creativity. It brings together innovators, makers, and enthusiasts from all over Europe. In addition to showcasing projects and inventions, it offers workshops, conferences, and labs to acquire technical skills and stimulate collaboration.

It attracts students, startups, companies, and government entities, fostering idea exchange and technological evolution. It has become a reference point for the European innovators community, highlighting Italy as a center of innovation and creativity.

Duckietown went to Rome from the 17th to the 19th of October, to showcase our robots, meet enthusiasts and other exhibitors, and talk about robotics and robot autonomy. And what a ride it has been! Here below are some photos we took at the event.

And for those of you who could not get a chance to talk to us at the event and get our contact, don’t forget to sign up to our new Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown Massive Online Open Course!

About Duckietown

Duckietown is a platform for creating and disseminating robotics and AI learning experiences.

Duckietown parnters with Massrobotics in Boston for the Duckiedrone summer 2024 academy

The 6th Annual Massrobotics Duckiedrone Academy

Posted on July 17, 2024 | by Jacopo Tani

Boston, MA, USA – Massrobotics, July 2024: instructors and learners gather at MassRobotics in Boston to learn about drone autonomy.

Quick links

The 6th Annual Drone Academy at MassRobotics

High school learners gathered at MassRobotics in Boston to learn about drone autonomy using the latest Duckiedrones, model DD24.

With the support of Brown University and Amazon Robotics, learners deep-dived for a week in the science and technology of autonomous flight.

Starting from a box of parts, the Duckietown DD24 drone and accompanying pedagogical materials enable a rich set of learning experiences for newcomers to autonomy, as well as for seasoned veterans.

Learners had the opportunity to practice soldering, electrical connections testing, software initialization for development and operations, actuator setup, sensor calibrations, low-level controller tuning, manual flight, and autonomous hovering.

This summer academy followed a similar experience at Howard University, Washington DC, that took place in June 2024.

The Duckiedrone is a DIY, Raspberry Pi-based drone designed to introduce learners to autonomous flight.

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.

Massachusettes Institute of Technology: first BCI hackathon

Posted on May 20, 2024 | by Duckietown Admin

Cambridge, MA, USA – McGovern Institute, 24-25 February 2024: Over 100 participants took part to the first MIT BCI hackathon, competing in teams to control Duckiebots using brain computer interfaces.

Quick links

Controlling Duckiebots using brain computer interfaces

Over 100 participants gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the first BCI hackathon organized by Dr. Federico Claudi. The participants tried to control a Duckiebot using only brain computer interfaces, and competed in a series of tasks.

BCI is the field of research that studies how to measure, amplify, filter and utilize electrical signals from the brain to interact with external devices.

What made this hackathon distinctive was the hands-on challenge, where participants were tasked with controlling a physical robot. This not only tested participants’ technical skills but also showcased their ability to tackle real-world problems through innovative BCI applications.

The task teams competed on was having Duckiebots (DB21-J4) navigate a road loop as fast as possible while avoiding Duckies. Here is an example:

The hardware used in this competition was an X.on EEG headset, and Duckiebots for control. Also, the winning team’s solution will be soon made available as a reproducible Learning Experience with Duckietown – stay tuned!

The Duckiebot is a DIY, Raspberry Pi-based robot powered by Nvidia and designed for introducing learners to autonomous technologies.

If you would like to contribute in developing accessible BCI LXs with Duckietown, and support the dissemination of BCI research, e.g. reach out to us at [email protected].

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.

Duckiedrone: how to fly a Raspberry Pi-based autonomous quadcopter

Posted on October 16, 2023 | by Duckietown Admin

Boston, 20 October 2023: Duckietown Sky and the Duckietown drone, a Raspberry Pi-based autonomous quadcopter, are discussed with the Aerial ROS community, a group of experts working to define the future of software architectures for quadcopters.

Quick links

Learning robot autonomy by flying with Duckietown Sky

Following an invitation to the Aerial ROS workgroup community meeting, Duckietown staff was delighted to present the Duckietown Sky initiative, the current Duckiedrone design, a DIY Raspberry Pi-based autonomous quadcopter, and future plans for both hardware and courseware development.

The goal of the ROS (Robotic Operating System) aerial robotics working group is to gather drone enthusiasts within the ROS community and facilitate the sharing of ideas and discussion of issues regarding autonomous robotic platforms operating in the air.

Duckietown Sky, a National Science Foundation-funded educational effort in collaboration with Brown University started in 2019, is an integral component of the Duckietown education vision, representing the commitment to fostering robot autonomy education in all its forms. Beyond self-driving cars (Duckiebots) and smart cities (Duckietowns), Duckietown highlights what is common despite the different applications of robot autonomy. From ground to sky, whether it drives, flies, or blinks, Duckietown is a platform to learn, explore and innovate when it comes to robot autonomy.

With the focus on quadcopters, Duckietown Sky offers MOOC-style learning experiences tailored for undergraduate and senior high school students. Flight is exciting!

The program’s design criteria revolves around achieving state-of-the-art autonomy ground-up using off-the-shelf components, with a Raspberry Pi as core computational unit, for its wide-spread applications and large community. Duckiedrones, now at the second hardware design iteration moving towards the third, aim to provide students with hands-on learning experiences covering from the basics, such as soldering, to pretty advanced algorithmic cornerstones of autonomy such an UKFs (Unscented Kalman Filters) and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).

Aspiring engineers should however be prepared for preliminary requirements like soldering, have access to a laptop or base station, and an internet connection for setting the working environment up.

From a box of parts to a Raspberry Pi-based autonomous quadcopter

The Duckietown Sky experience is an exciting journey that begins with a simple box of parts and culminates in the creation of an autonomously flying drone. In the Duckietown spirit of democratizing access to the science and technology of autonomy through accessible platforms, the happy-yellow Duckiebox includes almost everything needed to get flying.

We encourage instructors, students and practitioners to check the development roadmaps for both our hardware design and courseware, outlined in our presentation, and reaching out without hesitation to provide comments or feedback!

Building on the extensive experience of the Duckietown team in massive open online courses (check out the Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown MOOC: the world’s first robot autonomy MOOC with hardware), we look to prepare a series of short online courses. These courses will be led by Professors from Brown, as well as other universities, and will provide an ever broader audience with the opportunity to explore the fascinating world of robot autonomy: from the science and technology to the tools and workflows, to real-world applications presented by industry and academic leaders.

Want to try the Duckietown Sky experience yourself, build a DYI Raspberry Pi-based autonomous quadcopter, or teach an aerial autonomy class at your high school or at university level? Follow the steps below to begin now.

Learn more about Duckietown

Duckietown 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.

Group photo of the Duckietown Duckiedrone Summer Academy at MassRobotics - 2023

Exploring the skies at the summer Duckiedrone academy

Posted on July 27, 2023 | by Ivano Marocchi

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!

Quick links

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.

AI Driving Olympics 2021: Urban League Finalists

Posted on December 8, 2021 | by Jacopo Tani

AI Driving Olympics 2021 - Urban League Finalists

This year’s embodied urban league challenges were lane following (LF), lane following with vehicles (LFV) and lane following with intersections, (LFI). To account for differences between the real world and simulation, this edition finalists can make one additional submission to the real challenges to improve their scores. Finalists are the authors of AI-DO 2021 submissions in the top 5 ranks for each challenge. This year’s finalists are:

LF

András Kalapos
Bence Haromi
Sampsa Ranta
ETU-JBR Team
Giulio Vaccari

LFV

Sampsa Ranta
Adrian Brucker
Andras Beres
David Bardos

LFI

András Kalapos
Sampsa Ranta
Adrian Brucker
Andras Beres

The deadline for submitting the “final” submissions is Dec. 9th, 2 pm CET. All submissions received after this time will count towards the next edition of AI-DO.

Don’t forget to join the #aido channel on the Duckietown Slack for updates!

Congratulations to all the participants, and best of luck to the finalists!

Join the AI Driving Olympics, 6th edition, starting now!

Posted on November 1, 2021 | by Ivano Marocchi

The 2021 AI Driving Olympics

Compete in the 2021 edition of the Artificial Intelligence Driving Olympics (AI-DO 6)!

The AI-DO serves to benchmark the state of the art of artificial intelligence in autonomous driving by providing standardized simulation and hardware environments for tasks related to multi-sensory perception and embodied AI.

Duckietown traditionally hosts AI-DO competitions biannually, with finals events held at machine learning and robotics conferences such as the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

AI-DO 6 will be in conjunction with NeurIPS 2021 and have three leagues: urban driving, advanced perception, and racing. The winter champions will be announced during NeurIPS 2021, on December 10, 2021!

Urban driving league

The urban driving league uses the Duckietown platform and presents several challenges, each of increasing complexity.

The goal in each challenge is to develop a robotic agent for driving Duckiebots “well”. Baseline implementations are provided to test different approaches. There are no constraints on how your agents are designed.

Each challenge adds a layer of complexity: intersections, other vehicles, pedestrians, etc. You can check out the existing challenges on the Duckietown challenges server.

AI-DO 2021 features four challenges: lane following (LF), lane following with intersections (LFI), lane following with vehicles (LFV) and lane following with vehicles and intersections, multi-body, with full information (LFVI-multi-full).

All challenges have a simulation and hardware component (,), except for LFVI-multi-full, which is simulation () only.

The first phase (until Nov. 7) is a practice one. Results do not count towards leaderboards.

The second phase (Nov. 8-30) is the live competition and results count towards official leaderboards.

Selected submissions (that perform well enough in simulation) will be evaluated on hardware in Autolabs. The submissions scoring best in Autolabs will access the finals.

During the finals (Dec. 1-8) one additional submission is possible for each finalist, per challenge.

Winners (top 3) of the resulting leaderboard will be declared AI-DO 2021 winter champions and celebrated live during NeurIPS 2021. We require champions to submit a short video (2 mins) introducing themselves and describing their submission.

Winners are invited to join (not mandatory) the NeurIPS event, on December 10th, 2021, starting at 11.25 GMT (Zoom link will follow).

Overview

🎯	Goal: develop robotic agents for challenges of increasing complexity
🚙	Robot: Duckiebot (`DB21M/J`)
👀	Sensors: camera, wheel encoders

Schedule

	Practice: Nov. 1-7
	Competition: Nov. 8-30
	Finals: Dec. 1 – 8
	Winners: Dec. 10

Rules

	Practice: unlimited non-competing submissions
	Competition: best in sim are evaluated on hardware in Autolabs
	Finals: one additional submission for Autolabs
	Winners: 2 mins video submission description for NeurIPS 2021 event.

The challenges

Lane following

LF – The most traditional of AI-DO challenges: have a Duckiebot navigate a road loop without intersection, pedestrians (duckies) nor other vehicles. The objective is to travel the longest path in a given time while staying in the lane, i.e., not committing driving infractions.

Current AI-DO leaderboards: LF-sim-validation, LF-sim-testing.

Previous AI-DO leaderboards: sim-validation, sim-testing, real-validation.

Lane following with intersections

LFI – This challenge builds upon LF by increasing the complexity of the road network, now featuring 3 and/or 4-way intersections, defined according to the Duckietown appearance specifications. Traffic lights will not be present on the map. The objective is to drive the longest distance while not breaking the rules of the road, now more complex due to the presence of traffic signs.

Current AI-DO leaderboards: LFI-sim-validation, LFI-sim-testing.

Previous AI-DO leaderboards: sim-validation, sim-testing.

Lane following with vehicles

LFV – In this traditional AI-DO challenge, contestants seek to travel the longest path in a city without intersections nor pedestrians, but with other vehicles on the road. Non-playing vehicles (i.e., not running the user’s submitted agent) can be in the same and/or opposite lanes and have variable speed.

Current AI-DO leaderboards: LFV-sim-validation, LFV-sim-testing.

Previous AI-DO leaderboards: (LFV-multi variant): sim-validation, sim-testing, real-validation.

Lane following with vehicles and intersections (stateful)

LFVI-multi-full – this debuting challenge brings together roads with intersections and other vehicles. The submitted agent is deployed on all Duckiebots on the map (-multi), and is provided with full information, i.e., the state of the other vehicles on the map (-full). This challenge is in simulation only.

Leaderboards: LFVI_multi_full-sim-validation

Getting started

All you need to get started and participate in the AI-DO is a computer, a good internet connection, and the ambition to challenge your skills against the international community!

We provide webinars, operation manuals, and baselines to get started.

May the duck be with you!

Thank you to our generous sponsors!

Ubuntu laptop terminal interface with hands operating keyboard, Duckiebot and duckies out of focus in foreground

“Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown” MOOC starting soon

Posted on March 4, 2021 | by Duckietown Admin

Join the first hardware based MOOC about autonomy on edX!

Are you curious about robotics, self-driving cars, and want an opportunity to build and program your own? Set to start on March 22nd, 2020, “Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown” is a hands-on introduction to vehicle autonomy, and the first ever self-driving cars MOOC with a hardware track!

Designed for university-level students and professionals, this course is brought to you by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), in collaboration with the University of Montreal, the Duckietown Foundation, and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Learning autonomy requires a fundamentally different approach when compared to other computer science and engineering disciplines. Autonomy is inherently multi-disciplinary, and mastering it requires expertise in domains ranging from fundamental mathematics to practical machine-learning skills.

This course will explore the theory and implementation of model- and data-driven approaches for making a model self-driving car drive autonomously in an urban environment, while detecting and avoiding pedestrians (rubber duckies)!

In this course you will learn, hands-on, introductory elements of:

computer vision
robot operations
ROS, Docker, Python, Ubuntu
autonomous behaviors
modelling and control
localization
planning
object detection and avoidance
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 90 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.”

This massive online open course will be have a hands-on learning approach using, for the hardware track, real robots. You will learn how autonomous vehicles make their own decisions, going from theory to implementation, deployment in simulation as well as on the new NVIDIA Jetson Nano powered Duckiebots.

“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.”

The Duckiebot MOOC Founder’s edition kits are available worldwide, and thanks to OKdo, are now available with free shipping in the United States and in Asia!

“I’m thrilled that ETH, with UMontreal, the Duckietown Foundation, and the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago, are collaborating to bring this course in self-driving cars and robotics to the 35 million learners on edX. This emerging technology has the potential to completely change the way we live and travel, and the course provides a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor of understanding and using the technology powering autonomous vehicles,” said Anant Agarwal, edX CEO and Founder, and MIT Professor.

Enroll now and don’t miss the chance to join in the first vehicle autonomy MOOC with hands-on learning!

AI Driving Olympics 5th edition: results

Posted on December 19, 2020 | by Ivano Marocchi

AI-DO 5: Urban league winners

This year’s challenges were lane following (LF), lane following with pedestrians (LFP) and lane following with other vehicles, multibody (LFV_multi).

Let’s find out the results in each category:

LF

Andras Beres 🇭🇺
Zoltan Lorincz 🇭🇺
András Kalapos 🇭🇺

LFP

Bea Baselines 🐤
Melisande Teng 🇨🇦
Raphael Jean 🇨🇦

LFV_multi

Robert Moni 🇭🇺
Márton Tim 🇭🇺
Anastasiya Nikolskay 🇷🇺

Congratulations to the Hungarian Team from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics for collecting the highest rankings in the urban league!

Here’s how the winners in each category performed both in the qualification (simulation) and in the finals running on real hardware:

Andras Beres - Lane following (LF) winner

Melisande Teng - Lane following with pedestrians (LFP) winner

Robert Moni - Lane following with other vehicles, multibody (LFV_multi) winner

AI-DO 5: Advanced Perception league winners

Great participation and results in the Advanced Perception league! Check out this year’s winners in the video below:

AI-DO 5 sponsors

Many thanks to our amazing sponsors, without which none of this would have been possible!

Stay tuned for next year AI Driving Olympics. Visit the AI-DO page for more information on the competition and to browse this year’s introductory webinars, or check out the Duckietown massive open online course (MOOC) and prepare for next year’s competition!