Kodiak Robotics, Inc., a leading self-driving trucking company, introduced the world's first driverless-ready semi-truck designed for scaled deployment. It is equipped with all the necessary redundant safety-critical hardware, including braking, steering and sensors, as well as the software required for driverless operations at scale.
Kodiak's sixth-generation truck further enhances the overall reliability of the technology by building on Kodiak's five years of real-world testing that includes 5,000 loads carried over more than 2.5 million miles. This new truck will be used for Kodiak's driverless operations, which it plans to initiate between Dallas and Houston in 2024. The vehicle will debut at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at Kodiak's LiDAR partner Luminar's booth in the West Plaza (outside beside the Diamond Lot) at booth number WP-10.
Kodiak's sixth-generation truck includes redundancy across all safety-critical functions, including a redundant braking system and redundant steering, redundant power, and Kodiak's custom-designed high-integrity Actuation Control Engine (ACE) system.
Kodiak's sixth-generation platform uses hardware that has proven safety performance in existing commercial applications. The Kodiak Driver, Kodiak's vehicle-agnostic self-driving system, including its redundant, driverless-ready hardware platform, is designed to be safer than a human driver. Kodiak plans to roll out its sixth-generation truck to multiple vehicle types.
The sixth-generation truck features twice the GPU processor cores, 1.6x greater processing speed, 3x more memory, and 2.75x greater bandwidth to run software processes compared to Kodiak's first-generation truck. With this launch, Kodiak's driverless truck design is now feature-complete across both hardware and software.
"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," said Don Burnette, Founder and CEO of Kodiak.
"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."
Future Enhancements
Kodiak will continue to iterate on its sixth-generation truck over the fleet's operational lifetime, incorporating improvements and additional features as it works with partners to develop and deploy new capabilities. For example, later in 2024 Kodiak will integrate a next-generation Ambarella CV3-AD AI domain control system-on-chip (SoC) to continuously improve the truck's sensor and machine learning capabilities, while transitioning to a high-volume SoC solution that also provides high AI efficiency and performance.
The introduction of Kodiak's sixth-generation truck follows the recently announced opening of a truckport to launch and land autonomous trucks, in partnership with Pilot, as well as recent partnership announcements with Loadsmith, C.R. England and Tyson, IKEA, Werner, Forward and more.
