Media

An HKU DuckieTown team won the 2^nd runner up in the “AI Driving Olympics” (AI-DO) held by the Duckietown Foundation at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montreal, Canada from May 20 to 22, 2019.

The team was supervised by Dr Loretta Choi of the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and comprised 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) at HKU.

In the AI-DO competition, competing teams need to score the best running in terms of travelled distance and survival time of a robotic vehicle (Duckiebot) in a miniature town (Duckietown) that replicates an autonomous driving environment. The teams have to train and deploy an imitation learning algorithm in the Duckiebots that enables them to navigate with inputs from cameras.

Dr Loretta Choi said, “It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to work with our undergraduate Engineering students who are passionate and self-motivated in delving into evolving AI technologies and applications. The competition provides an invaluable opportunity for students to experiment with their ideas in the context of an impactful auto-driving problem, and actually see how their solution works in a playful physical miniature replica of a driving environment.”

Among 192 competitors (many of which are research teams) from all over the world, the HKU team seized the 2^nd runner-up in the lane-following challenge.

The HKU DuckieTown team is supported by the Department of Computer Science and LITE Lab@HKU. The team will continue to recruit new members to allow more students to gain hands-on experience in machine learning and robotics.

For more information about AI Driving Olympics, please visit :
https://www.duckietown.org/research/ai-driving-olympics

Media enquiries:
Ms Celia Lee, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 3917 8519; Email: leecelia@hku.hk) or
Miss Bonnie Tsang, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 3917 1924; Email: bonniepy@hku.hk)