Commercial self-driving trucks began running between Texas, California and Florida

On July 26, 2022, Kodiak Robotics, an autonomous trucking company, said it had completed a commercial coast-to-coast flight in the United States between Texas, California and Florida. Transportation is organized by order of the logistics company Roads Express. This project was the first time Kodiak launched an autonomous cargo service in Florida.

The cargo flight included four commercial deliveries over a distance of 9 thousand kilometers in both directions, which began in San Antonio and followed to San Francisco, then to Jacksonville, after which they returned to San Antonio. In total, the trip took 114 hours.

Commercial self-driving trucks began to run between Texas, California and Florida

While testing or deploying heavy autonomous commercial trucks in California is illegal, Dan Goff, Kodiak's head of external relations, says Kodiak operates at Level 2, which is to say, with an advanced driver assistance system when it is in California.

The partnership with 10 Roads shows the viability of Kodiak's own lightweight mapping system, which does not rely on high-definition maps that Kodiak co-founder and CEO Don Burnett says are rapidly becoming obsolete. To put this route into operation, Kodiak sent one of its trucks on one manual flight to collect data on the new territory, which was then used to automatically create a map. Kodiak did not conduct any autonomy tests on the new roads prior to commercial use, which Burnett said proves Kodiak can quickly master new road routes.

During the experiment, Kodiak's autonomous system was involved more than 90% of the time, Burnett said, noting that the outages were caused by reasons such as complex construction areas, general driver discomfort and, in one case, equipment malfunction.

This was a single event, and Kodiak does not yet have the ability to carry out a route of the same scale on a daily basis. However, under the ongoing commercial partnership, the two companies will continue to work together to assess the potential of integrating Kodiak technology into the 10 Roads road fleet in the coming years, Burnett said.^[1]

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