Kodiak AI reaffirmed to CCJ (owned by Fusable, parent company of TPS) this week that it remains on track to launch driverless long-haul commercial service by the end of the year.
The company reports its Autonomy Readiness Measure (ARM) for long-haul driverless operations reached 93% at the end of August, up from 91% at the end of July.
The autonomous trucking system developer says in preparation for long-haul operations, it is completing work on its highway launch safety case, which is a structured argument, supported by evidence, that the Kodiak Driver, the company’s autonomous driving system, can operate safely in a defined operating environment.
Kodiak’s ARM measures the percentage of claims and evidence in Kodiak’s safety case for driverless operations that are materially complete. The increase to 93% reflects consistent progress in the remaining development, testing and validation activities required to safely launch the Kodiak Driver into long-haul driverless service, the company reports.
“What makes this measure powerful is that we know exactly what stands between us and driver-out long-haul operations, and that list continues to get shorter month after month,” says Don Burnette, founder and CEO at Kodiak. “We have identified and scheduled the remaining work, which is concentrated on final engineering verification and validation activities. We expect to complete the safety case before year’s end and launch driverless long-haul service.”
Kodiak says its driver uses a single AI architecture across use cases, with a distinct safety case for each operating environment. Kodiak’s long-haul safety case builds on the safety case the company completed for its industrial deployment in the Permian Basin, where 35 driverless trucks were operating commercially with no humans in the cab as of the end of the second quarter.
“The confidence to remove the driver is something a program builds, and we have built ours deliberately. Rigorous hazard analysis, mitigations designed into the system and its operation, safety engineering rigor on the parts that matter most, and continual validation that the assumptions behind our safety argument continue to hold. That discipline is what makes us confident in the path ahead,” says Frank Fratrik, director of safety at Kodiak.
The company currently delivers freight between Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, and El Paso using its autonomous technology with a safety driver behind the wheel, in addition to driverless operations in the Permian Basin.
