Duckiepond

Duckiepond is an education and research platform of a fleet of autonomous maritime vehicles, and is an offical branch of the Duckietown Foundation. The developments of Duckiepond include 1) the hardware Duckieboat, course materials, . The Duckiepond platform is built upon the Duckietown and AI Driving Olympics platform: Duckieboats rely only on one monocular camera, IMU, and GPS, and perform all ML processing using onboard embedded computers. It supports commonly used middleware (ROS and MOOS-IvP) and containerize software packages in Docker, making it easy to deploy. The powerful learning-based together with classic methods enable important maritime missions: track and trail, navigation, and coordinate among Duckieboats to avoid collisions. The Duckieboat has been operating in a man-made lake, reservoir, river, and seashore environments. The platform puts together the established materials of the Duckietown autonomy education, which has been adopted by universities globally since 2016, and the newly developed materials for maritime missions. All hardware and software materials are openly available, and we wish that the communities across related domains will adopt the platform for education and research.