Kodiak Robotics Inc. has introduced its fourth-generation autonomous truck with plans to more than double the size of its self-driving fleet in the next few years.
The new autonomous truck will feature:
- Luminar’s Iris lidar
- ZF’s full range radar
- Hesai 360° scanning lidars for side- and rear-view detection
- Cummins X15 series engines
- Bridgestone Americas smart sensing tire technology
- Nvidia’s Drive platform
The trucks will debut beginning in the fourth quarter of 2021 as Kodiak begins to take delivery of 15 new tractors.
Kodiak placed an order for an additional 15 trucks to be delivered in the next year, which will more than double the company’s fleet size and help expand its business delivering freight for commercial customers in Texas and beyond. Kodiak said it will expand throughout the southern half of the U.S. in the next few years.
"Complex and bulky systems that require an engineer to hand-build and hand-tune are expensive, unreliable and difficult to debug," said Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics. "We believe that reliability and scalability flow from simplicity, and the best hardware modifications should be barely visible. Our fourth-generation platform is designed for simple, scaled production which means easy calibration, troubleshooting and maintenance for our partners."
The Cummins X15 series engines feature a powertrain interface that allows the autonomous system to communicate with the engine. The Bridgestone tires are equipped with cloud-connected sensors that capture tire-centric data, which is processed into live actionable insights, increasing uptime and improving the safety and efficiency of the self-driving trucks.
The Nvidia Drive Orin platform has more than 250 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of compute performance. While the Drive Orin is not available yet, Kodiak will use the Drive AGX Pegasus in the meantime to process the data from cameras, allowing the self-driving system to perceive its environment.
