Draft:Duckietown

Duckietown (Boston, Massachusetts)is a robotics and AI technology company who develops autonomous mobile robotics. It is a spin-​​off of ETH Zurich, an academic organization, and originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

History
Duckietown started as a class at MIT in 2016 for the master students of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as a hands-on learning experience with the goal to "create a fleet of fifty self-driving taxis that can navigate the roads of a model city with just a single on-board camera and no pre-programmed maps" using off-the-shelf components and open-source software tools. A documentary (the "Duckumentary") was made from the first course.

In 2018 the Duckietown platform seeded the first edition of the AI Driving Olympics   : an international competition for benchmarking the state of the art of embodied AI for self-driving cars. The event was held at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS). Final events of following iterations of the AI-DO took place at NeurIPS and at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

In 2019 a Kickstarter was run to standardize the hardware component of the platform and make it available worldwide to make the platform more accessible and support the early-growth of the community. In the same year, Duckiebots were featured in the Science Museum of London's "Driverless" exhibition.

In 2020, the Duckietown platform was used in the "Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown" massive open online course (MOOC), hosted on the EdX platform.

Recognition
In 2021 and 2022 the Duckietown platform was nominated as a finalist in the EdTech awards in the following categories: higher education solution, robotics (for learning) solution, product or service setting a trend, and online courses / MOOCs solution.