Kodiak Robotics, a developer of self-driving truck technology, introduced Tuesday at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, its first driverless-ready semi-truck designed for scaled deployment.
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 CCJ Top 250 fleets C.R. England (No. 26), Werner (No. 13) and Forward Air (No. 34), among others.
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.
The Kodiak Driver, Kodiak’s vehicle-agnostic self-driving system, is redundant, driverless-ready hardware platform, and is designed to be safer than a human driver. The truck features twice the GPU processor cores, 1.6-times greater processing speed, 3-times more memory, and 2.75-times 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.
This sixth-generation truck will be used for Kodiak’s driverless operations between Dallas and Houston this year.
“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 Kodiak CEO and Founder Don Burnette, adding his company has logged 2.5 million miles, successfully demonstrating "that our self-driving trucks can withstand the harsh environment of long-haul trucking from both a platform integrity and a software perspective."
Braking. While traditional trucks feature redundant braking systems, Kodiak is taking it one step further in the interest of safety. Kodiak’s pneumatic braking system consists of three individual brake actuators simultaneously controlled by Kodiak’s proprietary software. Should any of the braking actuators fail, the backup systems can prevent loss of control and bring the truck to a safe stop.
