Tucson and Innovusion in the future to promote safe and efficient operation of autonomous trucks

On May 31, lidar provider Innovusion and autonomous driving company Tucson Future announced that they have officially reached a strategic partnership.

It is understood that the two parties will focus on unmanned logistics and freight scenarios such as China's ports to mainline logistics and urban transportation, and explore the deep integration of Innovusion's vehicle-grade high-performance lidar series and its perception algorithms with TuSimple's future self-driving trucks, and promote the construction of autonomous driving. The safe and efficient operation ecology of the truck industry has accelerated the development of domestic heavy-duty truck freight driverless technology and the process of mass production and application.

Tucson Future and Innovusion reached a partnership, image source: Tucson Future

In fact, heavy trucks have excellent cargo-carrying performance. Compared with ordinary passenger vehicles, they have greater inertia and require longer reaction time and braking distance.This puts forward higher requirements for the perception andpredictioncapability of the heavy-duty autonomous driving system, and puts more emphasis on the perception distance and accuracy in the sensor configuration scheme.At the same time, the average daily operation of self-driving heavy trucks is more than 20 hours, which requires extremely high reliability and stability of self-driving perception sensors.

It is understood that the Innovusion image-level ultra-long-range lidar Falcon has the industry-leading high-precision long-distance detection capability, the ROI (region of interest) resolution is 0.06°*0.06°, and the longest detection distance can reach 500 meters. In the future self-driving truck front-loading fixed-point project, Falcon will be installed as the main-view radar in the future heavy-duty truck models of Tucson to help perception upgrade and provide safer, more efficient and economical self-driving freight.At the same time, Falcon has been verified to meet the requirements of vehicle regulations and can meet the needs of a wide range of autonomous driving applications.

In the future, TuSimple will be based on the autonomous driving freight network and integrate the most advanced autonomous driving software technology and hardware ecosystem.

In December 2021, Tucson Future completed the world's first fully unmanned test of unmanned heavy trucks on public roads. The whole process took 1 hour and 20 minutes without security guards and any human intervention.Tucson's self-driving truck of the future has demonstrated its ability to handle complex road conditions such as cities and highways, including traffic lights, on and off ramps, emergency lane vehicles, and lane changes.

Image credit: Tucson Future

In addition, it is worth mentioning that the future book of "autonomous driving first stock" Tucson is still difficult to be optimistic.In terms of its first-quarter results, despite the sharp increase in revenue, it is still hard to beat losses.Its first-quarter revenue was $2.264 million, a year-on-year increase of 140%, and its net loss was $112 million, narrowing year-on-year.

At the beginning of 2022, TuSimple also made an outlook on revenue and profitability in 2022. It is expected that the revenue in 2022 will be US$9 million to US$11 million, and the adjusted EBITDA loss will be between US$400 million and US$420 million.