We’re heading southeast on Interstate 10, headed into Tucson, Arizona, when we pass the group of men in orange jumpsuits and hard hats working on the side of the highway. “Inmates Working,” the sign on the back of the truck parked on the shoulder says. It’s the sort of sight that can generate a swirl of curiosity, pity, and distaste in a person, but the robot doesn’t register anything about who these men are. It’s thinking about that parked truck and the rule buried in its code that says when it senses something on the shoulder, it’s supposed to clear out of the right lane. Checking it has plenty of room, it makes a quick juke to the left, pulling its 18 wheels and four human passengers over the dashed white line.

This lane change is just one of a variety of impressive maneuvers TuSimple’s self-driving truck executes during a 40-minute demo ride I took with the company's CTO, Xiaodi Hou, on a sunny Friday morning last month. Between a smooth merge onto the highway and an easy exit, it cruised steadily, adjusting its speed and position as necessary to accommodate its human-piloted neighbors.

Powering the impressive showing are the sensors studded around the truck, including two lidar laser scanners and a forward-facing radar. The key to the system, though, is the handful of cameras looking forward, to the side, and to the back. In an increasingly crowded robo-trucking field, TuSimple’s bid to stand out hinges on those cameras, which Hou says let the vehicle see as far as 1,000 meters ahead—nearly triple the range claimed by by most of its competitors. With them, Hou is attempting to solve one of the most dastardly problems facing engineers who are trying to make vehicles that drive themselves.

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Hou has been working on computer vision since he was a graduate student at CalTech. After earning a PhD in the subject in 2014, the Beijing native fled academia (“more and more politics”) and started a company that applied computer vision to online advertising. That soon flopped, and he refocused his skills on autonomous trucking, founding TuSimple in September 2015. The company has headquarters in San Diego and Beijing, and a testing facility outside Tucson, benefitting from Arizona’s sunny weather and light regulatory touch.

While operating robots in cities remains an uncracked problem, putting them on the highway is a lighter lift. “Trucking is a relatively narrow scenario,” Hou says. Since big rigs spend nearly all their time on the highway, they don’t have to worry much about how to navigate through complex urban scenarios, with their intersections and pedestrians and cyclists. “And it has a lot of potential to go to extremely high reliability,” he adds.

If, that is, the vehicle can make proper sense of its surroundings. Perception is likely the hardest part of self-driving, and in recent years, lidar has been seen as the top tool for the job. That laser-based system, though, has a limited range—the most powerful systems can detect objects out to 250, maybe 300 meters.