Autonomy Signals: Build America 250 Act, XPeng's Pure Vision Robotaxi, SMILE Reaches Orbit

This week on Autonomy Signals, Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss the BUILD America 250 Act, XPeng’s mass-produced pure vision robotaxi, and the ESA-China SMILE mission reaching orbit.

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves and Ranking Member Rick Larsen released the text of the BUILD America 250 Act, a bipartisan five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill that includes the first-ever federal framework for autonomous trucks.

The bill, if passed and signed into law in its current form, would provide regulatory preemption for autonomous trucking in the United States and authorize nearly $30 million annually through 2031 for workforce development grants.

Over in China, XPeng’s first mass-produced robotaxi rolled off its production line in Guangzhou. The robotaxi is built on the company’s GX platform and features a pure vision system powered by their in-house Turing AI chips.

Then there is the SMILE mission, a landmark collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences that launched on May 19 from Kourou, French Guiana, aboard a Vega-C rocket. SMILE carries the world’s first space-borne soft X-ray imager and an ultraviolet aurora imager designed to observe and predict the space weather events that disrupt the global navigation satellite systems that autonomous vehicles, drones, and maritime vessels rely on for centimeter-level positioning.

Episode Chapters

00:00 AUTNMY AI

1:32 Signal 1: BUILD America 250 Act

37:39 Signal 2: XPENG Pure Vision Robotaxi

58:51 Signal 3: ESA/China SMILE Mission Reaches Orbit

Autonomy Signals is presented by KPMG.

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