Mission
Our mission is to make the world excited about the beauty, the fun, the importance, and the challenges of robotics and AI, through learning experiences that are tangible, accessible, and inclusive.
We achieve this mission by designing robotics platforms and curricula for all levels of education and promoting their use in the world.
Robotics and AI
Beauty
Fun
Importance
Challenges
The beauty and the fun
AI and robotics are the most beautiful disciplines – it is mankind’s attempt at creating artificial creatures that think and act like us.
And it is fun to see robots go!
The importance and the challenges
AI and robotics will change our world. Everybody should understand the possibilities, the current status and how much is left to do.
Learning experiences
Although we design, develop and distribute hardware, software and pedagogical materials for the Duckietown platform, this is just a means to an end: we care about the learning experience the platform enables.
Tangible
We learn by handling and doing. We believe that to gain real-world competence, especially in robotics, it is necessary to be able to touch a robot.
We join the maker spirit with the academic spirit: the experiences are fun, but there is also a path of academic learning.
Accessible
We engineer Duckietown to make the barrier of entry as small as possible: affordable, broadly available, with step-by-step instructions to go from zero to hero.
Inclusive
We promote a broad understanding of the effects of robotics and AI in society.
While we do not advocate for everyone to become a roboticist, we believe literacy in the topics of autonomy is needed for everyone, to develop the critical thinking skills for navigating this historical phase of integration of robots in society.
Engineers are building autonomous robots, but society at large will have to decide how much and for what to use them, as the social repercussions of these decisions will be relevant for generations to come.
