Don Barnett, CEO and co-founder of self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics, said he had an “aha moment” when his company began working with the Department of Defense.
Kodiak's mission has always been to pursue long-haul autonomous trucking, but two years ago the startup won a $50 million contract from the Department of Defense to help the Army automate ground vehicles for high-risk missions. The contract gave Kodiak much-needed funding in a tight funding market, and it also gave the startup an opportunity to test its self-driving stack in unstructured off-road environments.
This experience gave birth to the idea that going off-road might get the car to market faster than driving a truck on the highway.
Kodiak announced this week that it plans to partner with proppant (also known as sand) and oilfield logistics provider Atlas Energy Solutions to launch a fully driverless commercial trucking service by the end of 2024 or early 2025.
Kodiak and Atlas have been conducting driverless testing for several months. In May, the two companies completed Kodiak's first driverless delivery. A large truck with no human driver on board, equipped only with Kodiak's self-driving hardware and software stack, delivered fracking sand to Atlas in the Permian Basin, a remote area of West Texas. The 21 miles of land Kodiak traveled included no paved roads or structures, “just cacti and brush,” Barnett said.
Off-road driving poses unique challenges for AV companies: vehicles cannot rely on HD maps, as they often do not exist, and off-road environments are subject to changing weather conditions.
Burnett said that in the Texas desert, “the sand is constantly moving and everything is changing over time.”
“So the vehicle needs to know what the surface is and how to get to its destination,” Barnett said, “and that's something Kodiak's technology has really been honing over the last few years, and it's been driven in particular by our work with the Department of Defense.”
Kodiak Robotics says taking its self-driving trucks off-road gives it a path to profitability in the near future. Image courtesy of Kodiak Robotics
The founders noted that, at least for Atlas, off-roading offers a better product-market fit today than long-haul trucking.
Atlas' sand-moving operation runs 24/7, requiring at least three shifts of drivers to keep the trucks moving, making them more expensive to operate, Burnett said.
“So the value of autonomy in this particular domain is actually higher per truck than it is for long-haul trucking,” Barnett said. “That, plus the structure of the environment and the speeds you take into account, means that we've already been able to validate driverless driving with the technology we've developed and could effectively deploy it this year.”
Kodiak still plans to pursue long-haul trucking routes in parallel with its work with Atlas and the Department of Defense, but the road to revenue generation is much longer. To be sustainable and ultimately achieve its goal, Kodiak needs to be profitable much sooner.
The deal between Kodiak and Atlas will initially include two trucks, with more to be added over time. The startup will operate a Driver-as-a-Service model, with Atlas purchasing trucks directly from OEMs and Kodiak outfitting the trucks with its technology and providing ongoing support and monitoring services.
Kodiak isn't the only self-driving startup using Department of Defense funding to break into the off-road market. Earlier this year, the Army awarded up to $18.6 million to Overland AI, another company developing autonomous systems for military operations, to build a prototype self-driving software stack for its Robotic Combat Vehicle program. Overland is one of a number of startups and mature companies carving out an off-road niche in the AV sector.
“At this point, I believe the companies that find a path to profitability as quickly as possible are going to be the ones that ultimately win,” Burnett said.