Among 192 competitors from all over the world and a majority of research teams, “HKU DuckieTown Team” formed by six engineering undergraduates seized the 2nd runner-up in the lane-following challenge of 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.
The team was supervised by Dr Loretta Choi of the Department of Computer Science, comprised of four of her students, Woo Chung-yu, Ching King-him, Chen Wu-juang and Lo Yat-long and two Mechanical Engineering students Ng Ka-lok and Yip Tsz-fung. The “AI Driving Olympics” was hosted by the Duckietown Foundation where teams had to score the best running in terms of travel distance and survival time of a robotic vehicle (Duckiebot) in a miniature town (Duckietown) that replicates an autonomous driving environment. “HKU DuckieTown Team” trained and deployed an imitation learning algorithm in the Duckiebots that enables them to navigate with inputs from cameras.