Duckietown Inc.

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Duckietown Inc., founded in 2020, is a robotics and AI technology education company located in Cambridge, MA, USA.[1] Duckietown develops and maintains the Duckietown platform.[2][3]

History

The Duckietown platform initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016 [4][5]as a graduate class and research project.[6][7]

The original objective was to build a fleet of 50 self-driving taxis with rubber duckie[8] passengers that can navigate a model city's streets using just one on-board camera and no pre-loaded maps.[9][10][11][12]

In 2018, the Duckietown platform seeded the first edition of the AI Driving Olympics.[13][14]

In 2019, a Kickstarter was run to standardize the hardware component of the Duckietown platform.[15]It was also featured in the Science Museum of London's Driverless exhibition in this same year,[16] and in 2023 Duckietown objects accessioned to the museum’s permanent collection.[17]

In 2020, Duckietown releases the first edition of the “Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown” massive open online course [17] to provide an accessible, scalable, flexible, and duckie-filled introduction to robotics and AI through autonomous vehicles.[18][19]

References

  1. Corporate Division, Commonwealth of Massachusetts..
  2. Paull, Liam. Duckietown: An open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research. Duckietown: An open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research.
  3. The AI Driving Olympics at NeurIPS 2018.
  4. Nuttall, Chris (2019-10-07). "Europe gets tougher on tech". Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/a20f286c-e921-11e9-a240-3b065ef5fc55. Retrieved 2023-09-07. 
  5. Lobo, Savia. MIT’s Duckietown project on Kickstarter for self-driving cars (in en-US). Packt Hub (2018-08-22). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  6. Tani, Jacopo. Duckietown: An Innovative Way to Teach Autonomy (in en). Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Educational Robotics in the Makers Era (2017). Cham: Springer International Publishing. p. 104–121. ISBN 978-3-319-55553-9. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-55553-9_8.
  7. What is a Duckiebot? (in en). GovTech (2018-08-29). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  8. Griggs, Mary Beth. Meet The Self-Driving Rubber Duckie Taxis Of Duckietown (in en-US). Popular Science (2016-04-20). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  9. Lavallee-Koenig, Ashley. What we saw and heard at Upper Bound (in en). Taproot Edmonton (2023-06-06). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  10. Self-driving cars, meet rubber duckies (in en). MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016-04-20). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  11. Kamps, Haje Jan. MIT explains self-driving cars with rubber duckies (in en-US). TechCrunch (2016-04-20). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  12. Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown (in en). edX. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  13. Censi, Andrea. The AI Driving Olympics: An Accessible Robot Learning Benchmark (in en) (2019). doi:10.3929/ethz-b-000464062.
  14. Tani, Jacopo. Integrated Benchmarking and Design for Reproducible and Accessible Evaluation of Robotic Agents. 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2020-10). p. 6229–6236. doi:10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341677.
  15. Learn to Program Self-Driving Cars (and Help Duckies Commute) With Duckietown - IEEE Spectrum (in en). spectrum.ieee.org. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  16. The Science Museum explores a future driven by autonomous vehicles | Science Museum (in en). www.sciencemuseum.org.uk (2019-06-12). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  17. Search our collection | Science Museum Group Collection (in en). collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  18. Integrating big data into robotics with Duckietown (in en-us). University of Nevada, Reno. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  19. AI Driving Olympics - A Duckietown Challenge. www.i-programmer.info. Retrieved 2023-09-07.