The U.S. Department of Defense’s first autonomous test vehicle, a Ford F-150 pickup truck equipped with Kodiak Robotics’ software and sensor stack, has been revealed.
The vehicle is being used by the DOD to test autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance operations in challenging GPS surroundings, off-road terrain, and a variety of operational scenarios. After winning the $50 million, two-year contract with the Army in December 2022, Kodiak now has an additional year to construct and deploy two Ford F-150-based off-road vehicles. Should the pilot’s mission be accomplished, Kodiak may become a future collaborator for the Army in its efforts to develop autonomous military applications.
“The battlefield of the future will be autonomous in the end,” stated Don Burnette, the CEO and co-founder of Kodiak, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We want to remove men and women from dangerous situations. And it is this technology that will lead us into the contentious situations of the future.
The commercialization of self-driving trucks is the main focus of Kodiak’s go-to-market strategy, although many advanced mobility startups regard the military as a quicker route to cash. The Air Force has signed on with electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) companies like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation to increase advanced aerial technology in national defense strategies, while the Army has been pressing forward with various autonomous driving initiatives.
Kodiak is primarily providing the software and sensor suite as part of its relationship with the DoD. It will also collaborate with hardware manufacturers to integrate the Kodiak Driver onto an as-yet-undesigned, next-generation ground reconnaissance vehicle. Although ATV-style vehicles were being considered, Kodiak and the DoD concluded that they were too tiny for the intended use.
Kodiak’s Military AV in a Ford F-150 Shell
According to Burnette, TechCrunch, “[ATV-like vehicles] tend to be quite underpowered and they can’t carry both a lot of compute and sensing and people.” Therefore, in terms of size, the Ford F-150 was closer to the ideal platform that the Army was aiming for. And it’s a really competent car.
From Kodiak’s perspective, the most crucial thing is being able to offer a software and sensor stack that can be integrated into various vehicle types and fulfill a range of use cases. This is where the modular, swappable SensorPods from Kodiak, used by the startup in its Class-8 trucks, come in. Kodiak claims to have modified its pods for use in defense applications, and the so-called DefensePod can be replaced in the field by a technician without the need for specialized training in 10 minutes or less. The company claims that the installation of the Kodiak Driver in a new car took less than six months.
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