What’s Happening: Kodiak Robotics, Inc. has introduced its fifth-generation autonomous truck hardware platform, which features increased sensor redundancy, GPU processing power, and a more practical and efficient design. The company has removed the roof-mounted “center pod” sensor suite and relocated the front-facing Luminar Iris LiDAR and wide field-of-view camera to each of its proprietary mirror-mounted SensorPods™.
Why It Matters: Kodiak’s innovative approach to sensor placement simplifies the build process, improves maintainability, and enhances perception capabilities. These changes signify a significant step toward commercial deployment of the Kodiak Driver, the company’s self-driving technology.
Key Points:
- SensorPods™ offer better dual vantage points, redundancy, and visibility on both sides of the truck.
- On-the-fly replacement of SensorPods™ can be performed in as little as ten minutes, maximizing uptime and customer revenue generation.
- Kodiak’s fifth-generation truck features the most lean and fully-redundant platform in the industry, with a total of 18 onboard sensors.
- The long-range sensor suite includes four ZF Full Range Radar, two Hesai 360-degree scanning LiDARs, two Luminar Iris LiDAR sensors, and eight cameras.
- Ambarella CV2 perception system-on-chip (SoC) improves image quality and dynamic range for nighttime driving.
- The new platform incorporates aerospace- and military-grade technology for increased robustness.
- Kodiak’s hardware stack is designed for sensing, thinking, and acting through its SensorPods, main compute, and onboard custom-designed safety computers, respectively.
Bottom Line: Kodiak Robotics’ fifth-generation autonomous truck platform demonstrates significant advancements in sensor placement, redundancy, and processing power. These improvements bring the company closer to commercial deployment of its self-driving technology and showcase its commitment to real-world applications and road safety. With recent partnerships announced with IKEA, Werner, Pilot Company, and Forward, as well as a 24-month United States Department of Defense (DoD) project, Kodiak is poised for substantial growth in the autonomous trucking industry.
