Duckietown: An Innovative Way to Teach Autonomy

Abstract

Abstract. Teaching robotics is challenging because it is a multidisciplinary, rapidly evolving and experimental discipline that integrates cutting-edge hardware and software. This paper describes the course design and first implementation of Duckietown, a vehicle autonomy class that experiments with teaching innovations in addition to leveraging modern educational theory for improving student learning. We provide a robot to every student, thanks to a minimalist platform design, to maximize active learning; and introduce a role-play aspect to increase team spirit, by modeling the entire class as a fictional start-up (Duckietown Engineering Co.). The course formulation leverages backward design by formalizing intended learning outcomes (ILOs) enabling students to appreciate the challenges of: (a) heterogeneous disciplines converging in the design of a minimal self-driving car, (b) integrating subsystems to create complex system behaviors, and (c) allocating constrained computational resources. Students learn how to assemble, program, test and operate a self-driving car (Duckiebot) in a model urban environment (Duckietown), as well as how to implement and document new features in the system. Traditional course assessment tools are complemented by a full scale demonstration to the general public. The "duckie" theme was chosen to give a gender-neutral, friendly identity to the robots so as to improve student involvement and outreach possibilities. All of the teaching materials and code is released online in the hope that other institutions will adopt the platform and continue to evolve and improve it, so to keep pace with the fast evolution of the field.

Integrated Benchmarking and Design for Reproducible and Accessible Evaluation of Robotic Agents

“…The DUCKIENet is built using the Duckietown platform, which was originally developed in 2016 and has since been used for education [27], research [28] and outreach [29]. 2) The Duckietown software architecture: We implement the Duckietown base software as ROS nodes and use the ROS topic messaging system for inter-process communication.…”

Teaching Autonomous Systems at 1/10th-scale

“…These curricula cover fundamental concepts such as coordinate transformations and planning; however, the few There are several other autonomous vehicle platforms available, ranging from low-cost, simplistic options such as [8,14] to platforms which exceed $20,000 [7]. Duckietown [17] is another closely related course which focuses on ground robots; in contrast to the work presented in this paper, the course requires 34 support staff (more than the number of students) and utilizes differential drive robots and an external localization system. The current generation of the F1/10 hardware costs approximately $2400 and will become cheaper with each design iteration.…”

Developing a Simulation Model for Autonomous Driving Education in the Robobo SmartCity Framework

“…Costa et al [4] presented an autonomous driving simulator to gain the attention of and prepare the students to compete in the Portuguese National Robotic Festival (PNRT), especially in the Autonomous Driving Competition (ADC). A very similar approach to the one proposed here is Duckietown [5], an online MOOC for teaching AI and robotics based on self-driving cars, with which the authors have created a whole educational environment, with different city layouts, traffic signals, etc.…”