Electronics and Semiconductors

Kodiak Robotics launches fifth generation autonomous truck platform

10 April 2023
Kodiak’s fifth generation platform will be used in its current and future autonomous trucks. Source: Kodiak Robotics

Looking to expand its move toward commercializing autonomous trucks, Kodiak Robotics has introduced its fifth-generation hardware platform for automated driving that increases sensor redundancy and processing power.

The new platform removes the roof-mounted center pod sensor suite and relocates the front-facing Luminar Iris lidar and wide field-of-view camera to each of the Kodiak’s mirror-mounted SensorPods. This not only doubles the Kodiak Driver lidar coverage at long range but enables greater maintainability and serviceability as well as perception capabilities to autonomous trucks, Kodiak said.

The fifth-generation platform relocates the sensors to the SensorPods located on the side-mounted mirrors, which helps accelerate the processor accessing the sensors for maintenance. Additionally, the SensorPods maximize road safety and improve perception by placing the sensors at the same height as the driver, Kodiak said.

This gives dual vantage point with redundancy and visibility on either side of the truck as opposed to a single vantage point above the cab. This helps if a sensor is damaged allowing the autonomous trucks to remain safely operational.

Other features of the fifth-generation autonomous truck platform include:

  • Reduced electrical power requirements
  • 130% more GPU processing power
  • 60% more central processing power
  • 50% reduced power consumption
  • Decreased cooling requirements
  • Cummins X15TM Series engines

The fifth-generation platform is part of Kodiak’s push to expand its autonomous trucking future and will help in its recently announced 24-month U.S. Department of Defense project to help automate future U.S. Army ground vehicles.

To contact the author of this article, email PBrown@globalspec.com


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