Computer Vision News - March 2018

“ Find the right balance between professional and family life… ” 20 Guest: Xiaodi Hou - TuSimple Can you tell us about what you do at TuSimple? We actually do autonomous driving trucks. This is a little bit different from autonomous cars because the idea of a car is a ride sharing service. For trucks, we do highway self-driving freight transportation. We transport freight of goods from one place to the other. What technology makes this possible? There is a lot of technology that we use. On one part, we’re using deep learning, traditional computer vision and vision inference to do the perception, localization, loca planning, map construction, motion planning, prediction and control. That is the algorithm part of what we do. The engineering part of the work includes high performance computing, real time systems, and a lot of offline data processing. How did you choose to go in this direction? The idea of doing autonomous driving was pretty straightforward for us. There are three rules that we should follow. Rule #1 is that we wanted to see a difference between 99% and 99.9% accuracy. Normally, for example, if you do things like online image recognition, you won’t be able to perceive this difference. We want to make sure that this difference is giving us real data. The second idea is that we wanted to go into a field where we could have three years of technological advancement without getting bored. If you’re doing image recognition or image classification, after three years you will probably get bored with it. We wanted to really go into a bigger topic where we could have advancements here and there. Autonomous driving would give us tons of things to do. Even after working in this field for over two years, I still cannot imagine what the final co pletion of the technology will be. That is a perfect thing. The third thing is we want to have a clear, distinct model. Many of the AI startups do not have a clear business model. People say: “I can do this. I can do that.” They can transform your face into somebody else’s face, but how do you make money out of it? We really consider how we can make money by doing some really cool technology. Xiaodi Hou is the Co-Founder and CTO of TuSimple. TuSimple manufactures autonomous driving trucks in China and the United States. [thank you to Amanda Song ] Guest Computer Vision News