Kodiak Robotics gets $49.9M Army contract for off-road autonomy

Kodiak operating in the wild

The first year of the program began in October. Kodiak is applying its autonomous software stack for Army-specific use cases, including future Army vehicles. In year two, the company will implement its autonomous driving system on off-road vehicles. They will be capable of covering complex terrain and operating remotely in unpredictable and austere conditions.

The Ground Vehicle Autonomous Pathways project will fuse data from multiple sensors and allow for teleoperations of unmanned ground vehicles. Applied Intuition also received a contract to work on simulation where Kodiak focuses on physical testing.

“One of the challenges they’ve always had is the inability to fall back, mixing human and autonomous operation in a single system and platform,” Burnette said. 

Like it does in with its Class 8 autonomous trucks, Kodiak will use safety drivers in the first phase of its work.

Army helping Kodiak’s bottom line

“It’s a great synergistic program, and that’s how we’re thinking about it,” Burnette said. “Our technology was developed for over-the-road trucking. But it generalizes to a lot of other areas. We feel the technology we’ve developed for the commercial application is very applicable to government applications.”

And it helps Kodiak’s bottom line. The startup co-founded by Burnette in 2018 eschewed going public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). That avoids Wall Street pressure for improving results. Many young public companies are desperate for funds with stock prices in the low single digits.

Larger business potential

The military work is Kodiak’s second such project. It completed a 15-month Small Business Innovation Research contract with the U.S. Air Force to help develop autonomous vehicles for flight-line operations. Kodiak passed on continuing that effort because it was “looking for something a little bit more substantial from a financial contract perspective.”

The Army contract will lead to more jobs at Kodiak, which has more than doubled employment to about 180 since its $125 million Series B round led by Pilot Co. in November 2021. Pilot is developing an autonomous trucking hub in Atlanta that it may expand to its network of truck stops and travel plazas.

“For us, this is the start of a development program we would like to see into the future and build this into a larger business,” Burnette said.

Related articles:

Pilot Co. invests in Kodiak Robotics to develop autonomous trucking hub

Kodiak Robotics goes lightweight on mapping for autonomous trucks

Autonomous freight grows as source of 3rd-party capacity

Click for more FreightWaves articles by Alan Adler.