Xin Discusses Autonomous Vehicles With Tucson Weekly

ECE professor Hao Xin recently spoke with the Tucson Weekly about the rise of autonomous vehicles and the technology company TuSimple in Tucson. A semi-truck drove the I-10 from Tucson to Casa Grande without any humans on board in December 2021. This trip was the culmination of years of road tests for TuSimple, which plans to operate an eventual fleet of thousands of self-driving semis beginning in 2024.

“There’s still a lot of challenges to overcome in this field,” Xin said, who is co-founder of the automotive radar company LuneWave and the College of Engineering's 2020 da Vinci Fellow. “One of them is perception: How are you going to be able to provide better-than-human perception in these systems? That’s a big thing we’re working on [at LuneWave]. There’s also control within the self-driving algorithm. But beyond science and engineering, there’s work that needs to be done in policy and regulation.”

TuSimple plans to continue these trips through the first half of 2022 on a monthly basis.

“I think a big reason there is so much of this in Tucson is that the state of Arizona is advanced and progressive in terms of policy and encouraging companies,” Xin said. “And once you start to have a cluster of these types of companies, more companies come in. It’s a positive feedback effect.”