Safety Culture
At Kodiak safety is everyone’s responsibility. We’ve developed clear policies and procedures to ensure we follow safety best practices at every step of our development cycle and commercial operations.
The kodiakDriver
The kodiakDriver is the industry’s most advanced technology stack purpose-built for long-haul trucks, leveraging a unique sensor fusion system and lightweight mapping solution. Today, the kodiakDriver handles all aspects of highway driving, delivering freight safely, efficiently, and on time.
Safety. Always.
Safety is mission-critical. Whether we’re running a simulation, testing our hardware or software, or putting our trucks on the road, we hold ourselves and each other to the highest safety standards in trucking, self-driving or otherwise.
Safety Drivers
Our world-class Safety Drivers are responsible for monitoring both the road and the behavior of the vehicle.
Safety System
Core to safety, and table stakes for any autonomous system, is the ability to bring a vehicle to a safe stop. From the beginning, we’ve designed the kodiakDriver to pull over safely when necessary. Kodiak was proud to be the first autonomous trucking company to demonstrate fallbacks on public roads.
Tire blowouts
How the kodiakDriver responds to a tire blowout in four parts:
1. Identify tire failure
2. Initiate fallback
3. Trigger hazard lights
4. Stop with minimal deviation from center
Kodiak was the first autonomous trucking company to demonstrate this critical safety requirement. Another example of how we’re building the world’s safest driver.
Get the full safety story
Download our complete Safety Report to read more on how we’re developing and testing the kodiakDriver, safely.
Made for every aspect of highway driving.
We’ve purpose-built the kodiakDriver to operate in the environmental conditions required for long-haul trucking.
Construction
With shifting lanes, speed changes, heavy machinery, road workers, construction-specific signs and more, construction zones represent some of the toughest challenges for self-driving vehicles.
Heavy traffic
Rush hour. Holiday traffic. Construction backups. Heavy traffic is a normal but challenging highway occurrence. Our trucks can handle these hard to anticipate moments, optimizing their braking and acceleration to optimize for delivery windows while maximizing fuel efficiency.
Merging
Freight routes rarely run on a single highway. Our trucks merge on and off highways and can handle the hard to predict merges of other drivers.
Operating day and night
Without hours of service restrictions the kodiakDriver will be able to run nearly 24/7. Today we operate day and night, delivering freight in full sunlight and near-complete darkness.
Harsh weather
Freight needs to get where it is needed regardless of the weather. We believe the same. Our trucks deliver rain or shine.
Changing lanes
Slower-moving vehicles, interchanges, vehicles on the shoulder, and even unexpected obstacles are common on highways. The kodiakDriver can identify, plan, and execute a path around obstacles to safely continue towards its destination.
Delivering industry-leading performance.
Watch all 800+ miles as the kodiakDriver completes back-to-back round trips between DFW and Houston, with zero disengagements of our self-driving system.
Built for trucks
The kodiakDriver was built from the ground up specifically for trucks. Trucks run for hundreds of thousands of miles, in the harshest of environments, for extremely long stretches. Our focus has always been on building technology that’s reliable, safe, automotive-grade, and commercial ready.
- Sensing
Using an array of sensors, the truck is able to "see" what's around it.
- Thinking
A custom computer processes sensor data and plans the truck's path.
- Acting
The steering column, brakes, and throttle are controlled by the computer to safely move the truck to its destination.
- Human Machine Interface
An intuitive user interface ensures the Safety Driver is able to take control at all times, whether in manual or autonomous mode.
Hover part to learn more
A layered approach
Our technology stack is made of complex software and hardware system layers, each of which is responsible for a different component of the self-driving task.
1. Sensing
How the truck “sees” what’s around it, using its wide range of sensors.
2. Perception
How the truck turns what it “sees” into meaningful, actionable information.
3. Localization
How the vehicle places itself in the world and determines its location, orientation, and speed.
4. Planning
How the vehicle decides where to drive, taking into account road conditions and the likely behaviors of other actors and objects on the road
5. Controls
Actually applying the throttle or brakes, turning the wheels, and otherwise actuating the vehicle to precisely follow the plan.
Always aware
The kodiakDriver takes the unique approach of treating all its sensors as primary. This allows our technology to build a richer understanding of its surroundings while maximizing performance by taking advantage of each sensor’s unique properties.
Kodiak SensorPodsTM. Built for efficiency and scale.
In trucking, every minute off the road matters. That’s why we’ve built our hardware to be safe, efficient, serviceable, and scalable. With just a few bolts and three cables, anyone can change Kodiak SensorPods™, and keep their trucks on the road.
Kodiak Vision
The LiDARs, radars and cameras found on Kodiak trucks are incredibly powerful, but they’re only as powerful as the perception layer that processes the data they capture to create an understanding of what’s happening around the truck. We call our perception system Kodiak Vision and it has three main steps:
1. Raw data
The kodiakDriver’s sensor suite collects raw data about the world around the truck.
2. Detections
Detectors process raw data to locate and classify objects.
3. Fusion
The Kodiak Vision Tracker fuses the detections from each detector.
Kodiak Sparse Maps
Instead of relying on the HD maps commonly used in the industry, the kodiakDriver uses a unique lightweight mapping approach. Our maps contain just enough information about the highway to make autonomy possible, and allow us to quickly respond to the changing world. Unlike HD maps, Kodiak Sparse Maps are easier to build and maintain, and are so small we can ship updates to the entire fleet over-the-air. A key advantage when keeping our entire fleet on the same page, even when a construction zone pops-up, or a lane changes.
