There is a lot to like about human capabilities, but nothing would deserve that honor mode than our pledge to get better under all circumstances. This progressive approach, on our part, has brought the world some huge milestones, with technology emerging as quite a major member of the stated group. The reason why we hold technology in such a high regard is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which guided us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look beyond the surface for one hot second, it will become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component, in fact, did a lot to give the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and as a result, initiated a full-blown tech revolution. Of course, the next thing this revolution did was to scale up the human experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after achieving a feat so notable, technology will somehow continue to bring forth the right goods. The same has turned more and more evident in recent times, and assuming one new automotive-themed development pans out just like we envision, it will only put that trend on a higher pedestal moving forward.
Kodiak Robotics Inc., a leading self-driving trucking company, has officially announced the launch of world’s first ever driverless-ready semi-truck, which is designed for scaled deployment. According to certain reports, the stated truck brings to the fore necessary redundant safety-critical hardware, including braking, steering, and sensors, and to make them all work, it offers the software required for driverless operations at scale. Furthermore, the truck scales up the very reliability of autonomous vehicle technology, doing so by building on Kodiak’s five years of real-world testing that includes 5,000 loads carried over a distance worth more than 2.5 million miles. Apart from that, the truck also features twice the GPU processor cores, 1.6x greater processing speed, 3x more memory, and 2.75x greater bandwidth to run software processes, if we compare it with Kodiak’s first-generation truck. Talk about the promised value proposition on a slightly deeper level, though, we start with semi-truck’s braking capability. Unlike traditional trucks that usually offer redundant braking systems, Kodiak’s latest brainchild bets on a pneumatic braking, which is made up of three individual brake actuators simultaneously controlled by Kodiak’s proprietary software. Hence, if one of the braking actuators does fail, the backup systems can jump in to prevent loss of control and bring the truck to a safe stop. Next up, we must get into the truck’s steering mechanism. Here, you effectively have two redundant ZF actuators controlled by Kodiak’s safety system. This means whenever Kodiak’s safety analysis reveals any potential failure on the part of vehicle’s primary steering actuator, the wider steering system will be able to seamlessly switch to the secondary actuator. Such a feature should useful when the agenda is to maintain full control without compromising the vehicle dynamics. Similarly to what we saw in Kodiak’s fourth-generation and fifth-generation trucks, this sixth-generation iteration will also enjoy the benefits of Kodiak ACE, a proprietary, custom-designed, and high-integrity safety computer. Owing to the given ACE, drivers can easily navigate the truck to a safe fallback, away from the flow of traffic, in case there happens to be an unlikely event of a critical system failure. Another big pillar of Kodiak’s driverless semi-truck experience is its power. You see, the vehicle notably offers you a redundant power system, which in turn, is responsible for running computers, sensors, actuators, and all other electrical systems present inside the ecosystem of this truck. A detail we cannot go without mentioning would be how the power system in play is actually split into two fully isolated subsystems that ensure all safety systems can execute a safe fallback should either fail.
At least for the initial phase, Kodiak will use its new truck to conduct driverless operations between Dallas and Houston.
“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.”
Among other features, Kodiak’s semi-truck includes an array of upgrades that enhance its safety, functionality and performance. For instance, the company’s proprietary SensorPods, which house the sensors and are pre-calibrated, pre-built for fast and easy repairs, have been enhanced to include two upgraded higher-resolution LiDAR sensors. Now understood to be automotive-grade, these LiDAR sensors are further joined by two extra side radar sensors that will improve the truck’s long range object detection. The SensorPods in question now also have top-mounted and extra-bright hazard lights that are designed to comply with the autonomous trucking industry’s application for an exemption to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Regulation. As per the given regulation, traditional truck drivers are required to place warning devices on a roadway after a breakdown has occurred. All in all, Kodiak driverless-ready truck features 12 cameras, four LiDAR sensors, and six radar sensors. As for processing the increased inflow of data expected to emerge from such a setup, Kodiak will rely on NVIDIA GPU for high-performance compute.
Moving on from sensors, the brand-new truck is provided with a specialized set of microphones that can identify the presence of emergency vehicles and other suspicious sounds representing some hazard or the other. Joining the same are these redundant LTE communications links which allow the truck to establish highly reliable communications with Kodiak’s redundant command centers in Lancaster, Texas, and Mountain View, California.
For the future, Kodiak is planning to 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. At the same time, it will transition to a high-volume SoC solution which can also provide greater AI efficiency and performance.
The launch of Kodiak’s new semi-truck comes shortly after it partnered with Pilot to open a truckport for launching and landing autonomous trucks.
“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,” said Burnette.
