Kodiak Robotics has unveiled its first autonomous check automobile for the U.S. Division of Protection, a Ford F-150 pickup truck that the startup has upfitted with its software program and sensor stack.
The DOD is utilizing the automobile to check autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance missions in off-road terrain, numerous operational situations and GPS-challenged environments. Kodiak won the $50 million two-year contract with the Military in December 2022, and now has one other 12 months to construct and ship two off-road-capable automobiles based mostly on the F-150. If the pilot is profitable, Kodiak may very well be one of many Military’s future companions as it really works to advance autonomous army functions.
“Ultimately, the battlefield of tomorrow is going to be autonomous,” Don Burnette, CEO and co-founder of Kodiak, instructed TechCrunch. “We want to get men and women out of harm’s way. And this is the technology that’s going to take us into the future of contested environments.”
Most of Kodiak’s go-to-market is centered round commercializing self-driving trucks, however many superior mobility corporations are seeing the army as a faster path to income. The Military has been transferring ahead with various projects devoted to autonomous driving, and the Air Power has signed on electrical vertical takeoff and touchdown (eVTOL) corporations like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation to spice up superior aerial expertise in nationwide protection methods.
As a part of its partnership with the DoD, Kodiak is principally offering the software program and sensor suite, and can work with {hardware} suppliers on integrating the Kodiak Driver onto a next-gen, purpose-built, floor reconnaissance automobile, which has not but been designed or constructed. Kodiak and the DoD had been toying with the concept of an ATV-style automobile, however discovered these to be too small for the use case.
“[ATV-like vehicles] tend to be quite underpowered and they can’t carry both a lot of compute and sensing and people,” Burnette instructed TechCrunch. “So the F-150 was more size-wise equivalent to the ultimate platform that the Army is going for. And it’s a very capable vehicle.”
A very powerful factor, from Kodiak’s perspective, is having the ability to present a software program and sensor stack that may be built-in into a number of completely different automobile varieties and serve quite a lot of use circumstances. That’s the place Kodiak’s modular, swappable SensorPods are available in, which the startup makes use of on its Class-8 vehicles. Kodiak says it tailored its pods for protection functions, and that the so-called DefensePod might be switched out within the subject in 10 minutes or much less by a technician with no specialised coaching. It took lower than six months for the Kodiak Driver to be put in in a brand new automobile, in line with the corporate.
“We developed our autonomous driving system in a way that is conducive and broadly applicable to other environments outside of over the road highway,” stated Burnette. “We think that’s a strategic advantage. And we want to take advantage of the fact that our system works in these dual use environments.”
