Kodiak Completes Self-Driving Truck Delivery Ahead of Commercial Operations

Kodiak Robotics is touting its latest breakthrough in fully autonomous commercial vehicles today after completing the delivery of a driverless truck to partner and customer Atlas Energy Solutions in Texas. The delivery marks a major step toward launching autonomous commercial operations early next year.

Kodiak Robotics was founded in 2018 to develop a suite of autonomous technologies specifically designed for long-haul trucks to make the freight industry safer and more efficient.

Since then, Kodiak has built a unique approach to modular hardware that integrates sensors into an integrated sensor architecture optimized for perception and scale. In 2019, the company completed the first commercial self-driving delivery with a safety driver behind the wheel, followed by a no-disconnect delivery in 2020, in which a Kodiak driver drove 205 miles between Dallas and Houston without taking control of the system.

In 2022, Kodiak began working with the U.S. military to adapt its self-driving “driver” technology for defense applications. Earlier this year, it billed itself as the first self-driving truck company to build “an autonomous platform with all the iterations required for safe deployment of self-driving trucks.”

Today, Kodiak showed off its self-driving Class 8 trucks in action, delivering sand to its customer, Atlas Energy Solutions.

Watch the Kodiak Self-Driving Truck in Action in West Texas

Thanks to a previous partnership with Atlas, Kodiak successfully completed the first driverless truck delivery. The route ran through the Permian Basin in West Texas, which has been described as a really tough environment for truckers due to its hot, dry landscape.

The Texas Department of Transportation reports that the Permian Basin accounted for 7% of all traffic fatalities in Texas in 2021, despite being home to less than 2% of the state’s total population. As such, its dirt roads have provided an excellent test for Kodiak and its self-driving truck technology, which has proven successful, as you’ll see in the video below.

Kodiak says this autonomous truck breakthrough is just the beginning of its partnership with Atlas, and that it is already equipping two specially designed trucks with the Gen 6 hardware suite to support its customers. Atlas plans to deploy these two Kodiak driverless trucks in its commercial fleet operations in early 2025.