Autonomous trucking company Kodiak Robotics and supply-chain-solution leader Martin Brower today announced that they are working together to autonomously deliver time-critical refrigerated freight for quick-service restaurants eight times per week between Dallas and Oklahoma City. Since the companies began working together in July 2022, Kodiak has completed over 600 autonomous deliveries for Martin Brower.

Kodiak operates what Martin Brower calls a “shuttle lane,” where autonomous trucks shuttle full trailers between major hubs and local drivers handle the distribution of goods to multiple restaurants including two of the top five largest fast-food chains in the U.S.

“We chose Kodiak because we share a mutual commitment to safety and customer service,” said Mark Grittner, Director – Global Capital, Fleet & Facilities, at Martin Brower. “By working together, we can benefit from the safety, reliability, and efficiency provided by Kodiak’s autonomous technology while also ensuring our local drivers can continue to provide the best-in-class customer service that is foundational to Martin Brower’s reputation.”

The companies are working together to explore additional shuttle-lane opportunities that will optimize and future-proof Martin Brower’s network, allowing it to better serve the growing demands of its customers.

“Autonomous trucks are well-suited to the difficult work of long-haul driving while allowing our partners’ local drivers to handle last-mile deliveries and provide a personal touch for customers,” said Don Burnette, Founder and CEO, of Kodiak. “Martin Brower’s shuttle-lane model is an ideal application for Kodiak that enables us to demonstrate the value of our technology within our customers’ existing networks.”

As part of the partnership, Martin Brower has joined the Kodiak Partner Deployment Program, which helps carriers establish autonomous freight operations and seamlessly integrate the Kodiak Driver, Kodiak’s self-driving system, into their fleet.

 

Sixth-generation tech

The Kodiak Driver is a key element of what Kodiak calls the world’s first driverless-ready semi-truck designed for scaled deployment that debuted at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show at lidar partner Luminar’s booth. This new truck will be used for Kodiak’s driverless operations, which it plans to initiate between Dallas and Houston in 2024.

The sixth-generation truck features enhanced overall technology reliability by building on Kodiak’s five years of real-world testing that includes 5000 loads carried over more than 2.5 million mi (4.0 million km). It features all the necessary hardware and software required for driverless operations at scale including for safety-critical functions such as redundant braking, steering, and power as well as Kodiak’s custom-designed high-integrity ACE (actuation control engine) system.

The Kodiak Driver vehicle-agnostic self-driving system, including its hardware platform, is designed to be safer than a human driver. The sixth-generation truck technology features twice the GPU processor cores, 1.6 times greater processing speed, 3 times more memory, and 2.75 times greater bandwidth to run software processes compared to the first-generation truck. With the launch, Kodiak says its driverless truck design is now feature-complete across both hardware and software.

“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 Burnette. “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.”

The pneumatic braking system consists of three individual actuators simultaneously controlled by proprietary software. Should any of the braking actuators fail, the backup systems can prevent loss of control and bring the truck to a safe stop.

The steering system includes two redundant ZF actuators controlled by the safety system. Should the primary steering actuator experience any type of failure, the steering system switches to the secondary actuator to maintain full control without compromising vehicle dynamics and move the vehicle into a safe state.

As on the fourth- and fifth-generation trucks, the sixth generation includes the proprietary, custom-designed, high-integrity ACE safety computer. It is responsible for ensuring that the Kodiak Driver can guide the truck to a safe “fallback” out of the flow of traffic in the unlikely event of a critical system failure.

The power system that powers the computers, sensors, actuators, and other electrical systems is split into two fully isolated subsystems that ensure all safety systems can execute a safe fallback should either fail.

 

Key upgrades

The new truck system includes an array of upgrades that enhance safety, functionality, and performance.

Kodiak’s proprietary SensorPods, which house the sensors and are pre-calibrated and -built for fast and easy repairs, have been enhanced to include two upgraded higher-resolution lidar sensors, which are now automotive-grade thanks to Luminar. Two additional side radar sensors improve long-range object detection.

In total, the driverless-ready truck features 12 camera, four lidar, and six radar sensors. To process the increased sensor data, the Kodiak Driver relies on Nvidia GPUs for high-performance compute.

Also new to the SensorPods are top-mounted, 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 392.22, which requires traditional truck drivers to place warning devices on a roadway after a breakdown. Since driverless trucks can’t place road flares or other devices along the roadway, these lights will be used to alert other drivers to the presence of a truck on the side of the road, pending Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration approval.

The truck is now equipped with microphones designed to detect and identify the presence of emergency vehicles and other sounds that could represent a hazard. It includes redundant LTE communications links, allowing it to establish more reliable communications with Kodiak’s redundant command centers in Lancaster, TX, and Mountain View, CA.

Kodiak will continue to iterate on its sixth-generation truck over the fleet’s operational lifetime, incorporating improvements and additional features as it works with partners to develop and deploy new capabilities. For example, later in 2024, Kodiak will integrate a next-generation Ambarella CV3-AD AI domain control system-on-chip to improve the truck’s sensor and machine learning capabilities, the high-volume solution providing high AI efficiency and performance.