The HKU DuckieTown team took part in the “AI Driving Olympics” held by the Duckietown Foundation at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montreal, Canada on May 20-22, 2019. Among 192 competitors (mostly research teams from all over the world), the HKU team seized the 2nd runner-up in the lane-following challenge.
The HKU team, which is supervised by Dr. Loretta Choi of the Department of Computer Science, comprised of six undergraduate Engineering students, four from Computer Science: WOO Chung Yu (Year 2), CHING King Him, (Year 5), CHEN Wu Juang (Year 5) and LO Yat Long (Year 5), as well as two from Mechanical Engineering: NG Ka Lok (Year 4) and YIP Tsz Fung (Year 4). The competition is to score best running in terms of distance travelled and survival time of a robotic vehicle (Duckiebot) in a miniature town (Duckietown) that replicates an autonomous driving environment. The team won by training and deploying an imitation learning algorithm in the Duckiebots that enables them to navigate with inputs from cameras.
The HKU DuckieTown team is supported by the Department of Computer Science and LITE Lab@HKU. In long-term, the team will be recruiting more members in hopes of allowing more students to gain hands-on experience in machine learning and robotics.
