Kodiak Robotics, Inc. has introduced the world’s first fully autonomous driverless semi-truck, optimised for scaled deployment.
The vehicle’s technology builds on Kodiak’s real-word testing, which thus far has included the transport of 5,000 loads carried over more than 2.5 million miles across the U.S.
It is planned to be utilised for Kodiak’s autonomous operations between Dallas and Houston throughout 2024, and recently made its debut at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Featuring Kodiak’s custom-designed, high-integrity Actuation Control Engine (ACE) system, the sixth-generation platform utilises hardware with previously proven safety performances in existing commercial applications.
With double the GPU processor cores, 1.6 times higher processing speed, 3 times more memory and 2.75 times greater bandwidth compared to it’s first-generation model, Kodiak’s autonomous truck design is feature-complete in both hardware and software.
Don Burnette, Founder and CEO of Kodiak, said:We’re the first and only company to have developed a feature complete driverless semi-truck with the level of automotive-grade safety redundancy necessary to deploy on public roads.
Over the course of 2.5 million miles, we’ve successfully demonstrated that our self-driving trucks can withstand the harsh environment of long-haul trucking from both a platform integrity and a software perspective. This truck fundamentally demonstrates that we’ve done the work necessary to safely handle driverless operations. While we continue to work with leading truck manufacturers, the technology we developed is deployment-ready, uncoupled from OEM timelines and truck manufacturer-agnostic, which allows us to move fast while keeping safety at the forefront.
The semi-truck comes equipped with Kodiak’s own pneumatic braking system consisting of three individual brake actuators, as well as two ZF actuators controlled via Kodiak’s safety system alongside redundant power and steering systems, among a slew of other enhancements and features, including it’s own proprietary SensorPods™, which utilise two high-resolution LiDAR sensors and two additional side radar sensors, bringing the total amount of cameras mounted on the vehicle to 12.
Kodiak plans to roll out the sixth-generation unit to various vehicle types.
