Category: Uncategorized

Learn robotics from the comfort of your home with Duckietown

Posted on | by Jacopo Tani

These are difficult times for us all. 

With physical distancing directives issued across the globe and many people restricted to their homes, we want to reach out (virtually) and offer our support.

To help you beat the isolation blues, the Duckietown Foundation is 

contributing $100

towards the next 100 orders of Duckiebots, Starter Kits, and Navigation Packs.

Remember that you can still learn about robotics without a robot!

Almost all of our resources remain open and available for your use.

Join us on Slack, peruse our library, or start training for the Urban League of the AI Driving Olympics.

Due to the closure of academic institutions the Duckietown Autolabs are temporarily closed. 

Coming soon: online demonstrations and tutorials to help you get started!

Have fun learning and stay safe!

Update to Dynamics Model in Duckietown Simulator

Posted on | by Liam Paull

We have implemented an improved dynamics model in the simulator. If you are using the simulator to:

  • Train your agent with reinforcement learning
  • Generate data for imitation learning
  • Test and debug your submission

then you may want to retrain/retest with the new dynamics model. This model is much closer to the true Duckiebot and should permit much easier transfer from simulation to the real robot hardware.

AI-DO1 Submission Deadline: Thursday Dec 6 at 11:59pm PST

Posted on | by Jacopo Tani

We’re just about at the end of the road for the 2018 AI Driving Olympics.

There’s certainly been some action on the leaderboard these last few days and it’s going down to the wire. Don’t miss your chance to see you name up there and win the amazing prizes donated by nuTonomy and Amazon AWS!

Submissions will close at 11:59pm PST on Thursday Dec. 6.

Please join us at NeurIPS for the live competition 3:30-5:00pm EST in room 511!

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.