Kodiak, a Silicon Valley-based autonomous truck technology expander, is expanding its business with a $49. 9 million contract from the U. S. Department of Defense. The U. S. Department of Labor is expanding software for an all-terrain robot vehicle that the military needs to use for long-term fighting applications.
During the 24-month contract, Kodiak will create the steering formula as a component of the Defense Department’s Autonomous Land Vehicle Paths project, which aims to eliminate humans from harmful military operations. In addition to offering software formulas and sensors for prototypes of autonomous armies, Kodiak will also paint on creating a teleoperations formula for the vehicles, allowing them to be guided if necessary through remote human operators. In addition to Kodiak, California-based Applied Intuition also provides the generation of futuristic combat vehicles, Defense Decomponentment said.
“We will apply our commercially evolved autonomy formula to unstructured off-road environments for autonomy and autonomy uses for the U. S. military. “We are in the U. S. , particularly targeting surveillance and reconnaissance applications,” Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Mountain View, told Kodiak to Forbes. “Like many others in the United States in the audiovisual field, I gave myself up to save lives. . . We have herb extensions to save the lives of our men and women in uniform.
On city streets, self-driving cars have broken their original promise, but the military uses this payload for the list of other programs of the technology, adding tractors and autonomous trucks for agriculture and mining, to mention the truck programs Kodiak is running. to market. It also represents something of a return to the origins of driverless cars in the form of a series of technical competencies in the early 2000s sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which introduced the autonomous automotive industry.
“There has been a revolution in the techniques and functions of unmanned floor vehicles that has occurred in the personal sector over the past two decades,” Kevin O’Brien, technical director of the Defense Innovation Unit, said in a statement. bring those mature technologies back to the Ministry of Defense, where initial paintings were encouraged through DARPA’s grand challenges. “
In the short term, the Defense Department contract provides Kodiak with much-needed revenue, as the company doesn’t expect its robot trucks to become an advertising industry until 2025.
The contract is also a positive progression given the turmoil in the autonomous vehicle box. Argo AI, which had raised more than $3 billion from Ford and Volkswagen, shut down in October after its automotive backers decided the generation would take too long to perfect. Meanwhile, robot truck rival TuSimple has been rocked through a mix of control and dashboard in recent weeks that resulted in the firing of most of its board members. Yesterday, TuSimple also said its progression partnership with truck maker Navistar has ended.
Although Alphabet Inc. et Cruise’s Waymo, subsidized through General Motors, continues to expand its robotaxi operations, industry analysts expect further consolidation in the area of autonomous vehicles in the coming months as the festival intensifies and shrinks the first of all giant competition numbers due to a lack of resources or technological issues.
“We haven’t had any verbal exchanges lately about consolidation, but as corporations become more and more desperate, I think we’re going to see some attractive moves,” Burnette said.