Guide for researchers
Build a mobile robotics lab for accessible and reproducible research
I am a researcher
Duckietown is a modular, inexpensive research platform for studying autonomy in complex systems.
Think of it as an “experimental simulator” which exposes the nuisances of the real world while preserving control over the environment.

Value proposition
We provide a baseline implementation for you 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.

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 infrastructure (AI-DO)
- A community to bounce ideas off
- A simulation-based system for robotic agent benchmarking
- A physical system for reproducible agent benchmarking (Autolab)
Researcher: first steps
- Join the Duckietown community on Slack
- Learn about the capabilities of the platform
- Get the hardware
Reach out for additional information
Want to upgrade your Duckietown to Autolab and enable experimental evaluations locally, or have questions on how to bring Duckietown to your institution?
Reach out or request a formal quote here:
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.

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
Starting from MIT CSAIL, Duckietown has grown into a global initiative that is inspiring students around the world to learn about self-driving cars, as well as the science and engineering of autonomy.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
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!

University of Montreal
If University were like learning how to play a new instrument, where lessons are the exercises and exams the final auditions, Duckietown would be the full-blown rock concert, where you play for your fans and look to your heroes with admiration.

ETH Zurich
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!

Robot Perception and AI at Symbotic
Spending the summer in Duckietown at MIT made me discover a completely new world: I understood that education can be a game and learning can be fun!

Great platform and solid e-learning experience!

NCCR Automation
Highly recommended. I joined the first cohort of "Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown" and loved it.

Airbus
Very excited to be a part of the upcoming edition of "Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown". In the last edition, my students and I enjoyed learning of many new topics with hands-on experience. All the student team had a very good experience. Amazing support by Duckietown!

MIT College of Engineering, Pune
Thanks to the extraordinary learning and research platform Duckietown from ETHZurich, TTI Chicago, University of Montreal and the helpful around-the-hour support from the Duckietown core team #BFH was able to successfully introduce its BSc automotive engineering students in the exciting world of autonomous driving!

Berner Fachhochschule BFH
I believe that there’s a lot of interesting research directions that come from a standardized, small scale, accessible autonomous driving platform like Duckietown.

Université de Montréal
All the different concepts ranging from control to localization to computer vision can be applied in Duckietown. My students like it and they learn a lot about robotics.

In my class we go over the basics of robotics, starting with multi-agent processing or multi-process systems, like most robots are these days, and the Duckiebots are perfect for that

University of Massachusetts Lowell
I think Duckietown is a very good education platform for teachers. We make use of the very good materials provided by Duckietown and I’m very satisfied with its implementation.

University of Nevada, Reno
In engineering, true learning comes from practical implementation, and Duckietown offers that opportunity effectively.

University of Rome "La Sapienza"
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