Self-Driving Truck Company Completes First Driverless Delivery

Self-driving tech company Kodiak Robotics has completed its first driverless delivery as part of a new partnership with Atlas Energy Solutions.

The landmark journey was undertaken in West Texas’ Permian Basin, where one of Atlas’s high-capacity trucks, fitted with the Kodiak Driver solution, traveled a total of 21 miles unmanned to transport frac sand from a depot to a well site, largely on dirt roads.

The driverless journey realizes one of Kodiak’s key goals for 2024, as CEO Don Burnette explained in an interview with IOT World Today in early January. Over the past couple of years, Kodiak has established itself as a leader in the autonomous freight arena in the southern states thanks to several pilots with some major carriers.

The agreement between Kodiak and Austin-based Atlas will see the latter order two Kodiak-equipped driverless trucks to be used across the Permian Basin’s infrastructure of private lease roads, with commercial operations scheduled to start in 2025.

Kodiak will provide the tech via a “driver-as-a-service” licensing agreement. In essence, Atlas will own the trucks, which will be kitted out with the Kodiak Driver’s redundant, platform-agnostic, hardware and software stack, which includes Lidar and radar sensors, cameras, a mapping system and more.

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Kodiak will also handle operational support, including remote monitoring from its operations center in Lancaster, Texas.

Burnette hailed the journey as a breakthrough moment for his company and the industry as a whole. 

“Our partnership with Atlas will make us the first autonomous semi-truck company to establish commercial driverless operations and the first company to make autonomous trucking a real business,” he said. “We look forward to scaling our trucking product not only in the Permian Basin, but also over-the-road.”

Automated transportation has long been targeted as a priority for the Permian Basin, due to its unique circumstances. A hot and exceptionally dry environment, it has proven a dangerous place to drive for truckers, with statistics from the Texas Department of Transportation showing that it accounts for 7% of traffic fatalities in the state, despite making up less than 2% of its population.

Chris Scholla, Atlas’s Chief Supply Chain Officer hailed the breakthrough, saying: “The Permian Basin’s expansive private lease road network, which expands across the Delaware and Midland Basins, is an ideal environment in which to introduce autonomous trucking in North America.

“With average traffic speeds of under 20mph on these large swathes of private roads, we can safely deliver a more reliable last-mile solution to our customers in the Permian Basin. This truly represents a step-change in oilfield logistics.”

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The Kodiak tech will not be Atlas’s only use of automated transportation there. It is also developing a 42-mile-long, fully electric conveyor system known as the Dune Express, which is nearing completion. This will also be used to haul sand.