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Kodiak’s sixth-generation driverless truck. | Supply: Kodiak Robotics

Kodiak Robotics Inc. launched its sixth-generation, driverless-ready semi truck at CES in Las Vegas this week. The corporate stated its self-driving truck is designed for scaled deployment and builds on 5 years of real-world testing. This testing included 5,000 masses carried over greater than 2.5 million miles. 

The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm stated it is going to use the brand new truck for its personal driverless operations on roadways between Dallas and Houston this yr. 

“Over the course of two.5 million miles, we’ve efficiently demonstrated that our self-driving vans can stand up to the tough setting of long-haul trucking from each a platform integrity and a software program perspective,” stated Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak, in a launch.

“This truck basically demonstrates that we’ve finished the work mandatory to soundly deal with driverless operations,” he added. “Whereas we proceed to work with main truck producers, the expertise we developed is deployment-ready, uncoupled from OEM timelines and truck manufacturer-agnostic, which permits us to maneuver quick whereas preserving security on the forefront.”

Kodiak stated the most recent version of its autonomous semi-trucks has all the required redundant safety-critical {hardware}. These embody braking, steering, and sensors, in addition to the software program required for driverless operations at scale. 

Redundancy is the important thing to security, says Kodiak

Kodiak famous that its newest autonomous semi-truck consists of redundancy throughout all safety-critical features. These embody a redundant braking system, redundant steering, and redundant energy.

Whereas conventional semi-trailer vans have redundant braking methods, Kodiak stated it needed to take this additional. Its vans’ pneumatic braking methods include three particular person brake actuators.

All three actuators are concurrently managed by Kodiak’s system. Which means if any of them fail, the backup methods can stop lack of management and produce the truck to a secure cease. 

The corporate has additionally outfitted its vans with a dual-redundant steering system that features two redundant ZF actuators managed by Kodiak’s security system. 

Based mostly on the firm‘s security evaluation, if the first steering actuator experiences any kind of failure, then the steering system switches to the secondary actuator. This enables the system to keep up full management and transfer the car right into a secure state with out compromising the car dynamics.

The vans have a redundant energy system that powers the computer systems, sensors, actuators, and all different electrical methods. Kodiak stated its energy system is break up into two absolutely remoted subsystems. These subsystems be certain that all security methods can nonetheless carry out a secure “fallback” ought to both fail. 

As well as, Kodiak asserted that each one of its vans, not simply the latest era, are outfitted with its custom-designed Actuation Management Engine (ACE). The ACE system is a high-integrity security laptop chargeable for guaranteeing that the Kodiak Driver can information the truck to a fallback out of the move of visitors ought to a essential system failure happen. 

Lastly, the truck features a redundant LTE communications hyperlinks, permitting the truck to determine dependable communications with Kodiak’s redundant command facilities in Lancaster, Texas, and Mountain View, Calif.

Kodiak’s newest era of vans options upgraded SensorPods and extra. | Supply: Kodiak Robotics

Contained in the sixth-generation truck

Like its earlier vans, Kodiak’s sixth-generation car options its Kodiak Driver, a vehicle-agnostic self-driving system and driverless-ready {hardware} platform. The vehicle-agnostic facets of the motive force will come in useful as a result of the corporate plans to roll out its sixth-generation platform to a number of car varieties. 

Kodiak claimed that its newest vans function twice the GPU processor cores, 1.6 occasions higher processing pace, 3 times extra reminiscence, and a couple of.75 occasions higher bandwidth to run software program processes than its first-generation truck. 

This newest era of vans additionally options upgrades to Kodiak’s proprietary SensorPods, which home the sensors and are pre-calibrated and pre-built for quick and straightforward repairs. Kodiak improved its SensorPods with two higher-resolution lidars, which are actually automotive-grade. It additionally has two further aspect radar sensors to enhance long-range detection. 

In complete, Kodiak outfitted its vans with 12 cameras, 4 lidar sensors, and 6 radar sensors. To course of this elevated sensor knowledge, the self-driving truck maker depends on NVIDIA GPUs. 

The corporate additionally added top-mounted, extra-bright hazard lights to its SensorPods. Kodiak designed these lights to adjust to the autonomous trucking business’s utility for an exemption to Federal Motor Automobile Security Regulation 392.22. This regulation requires conventional truck drivers to put warning gadgets on a roadway after a breakdown. 

Since driverless vans gained’t be capable to place highway flares or different gadgets alongside the roadway, Kodiak stated these lights shall be used to alert different drivers to the presence of a truck on the aspect of the highway, pending Federal Motor Service Security Administration approval. 

Kodiak additionally outfitted its vans with microphones, in order that its vans can detect and determine the presence of emergency autos and different suspicious sounds that would characterize a hazard.

Kodiak’s sixth-generation truck follows the corporate’s partnership with Pilot to open a truckport for launching and touchdown autonomous vans. It has additionally teamed up with Loadsmith, C.R. England and Tyson, Ahead and extra.

Kodiak plans to proceed bettering its self-driving vans. For example, it plans to combine an Ambarella CV3-AD AI area management system on chip (SoC).