Kodiak Robotics Teams Up With Remote Driving Specialist Vay
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Self-driving truck technology developer Kodiak Robotics is forging a partnership with remote driving specialist Vay, .
Under the deal, Vay’s remote driving setup — called Vay Station — will be integrated with Kodiak’s Assisted Autonomy system. Assisted Autonomy enables a Kodiak team member to remotely control a truck during low-speed and clearly defined scenarios, such as entering or leaving a customer’s facility or interacting with first responders. With the integration, Kodiak drivers will sit at Vay Stations — which feature a steering wheel, pedals and other vehicle controls.
Berlin-based Vay is best known in the U.S. for introducing remotely driven cars to rental customers in Las Vegas, viewed as a twist on the rideshare experience offered by Uber Freight parent Uber Inc. or Lyft.
With Kodiak, the integrated Assisted Autonomy and Vay Station setup would likely only be used a small percentage of the time Kodiak’s trucks — which feature its Kodiak Driver automated technology — are on a run, Chief Technical Officer Andreas Wendel told Transport Topics.
(vay_io via YouTube)
On a Dallas-Atlanta run, for instance, Assisted Autonomy would only be actively engaged for the first and last three minutes of the trip, Wendel said.
“It really helps provide a human backup in those low-speed situations where it is needed; not in high-speed scenarios,” he said.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Kodiak opened its first truck port in partnership with Pilot Co. in Villa Rica, Ga., near Atlanta in August 2023. The Villa Rica facility serves as the eastern hub for Kodiak’s network.
Kodiak Driver-powered trucks are operating fully driverless on private roads in the Permian Basin of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico carrying proppant for bulk carrier Atlas Energy Solutions.
Atlas produces and supplies proppant, gritty materials like frac sand mixed with fracking fluid that are used by oil and natural gas wells.
The company placed an order for 100 trucks and four are now operational.
Retrofitting further trucks with Kodiak Driver is to be carried out by Roush Industries.
Roush will upfit trucks at its Livonia, Mich., facility starting in the second half of 2025.
Detroit-based product development supplier Roush will open a production line for scaled upfitting of the truck’s customers supply to Kodiak.
Kodiak expects to upfit tens of trucks in 2025, hundreds of trucks in 2026 and thousands of trucks in 2027, said Wendel. How quickly Roush can upfit trucks is yet to be determined, he told TT.
At the moment, Kodiak Driver is being retrofitted to trucks, unlike the products of peers such as Aurora Innovation, ϳԹ and Plus, which are installing the technology on specifically designed tractors at truck makers’ assembly plants.
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“OEMs are not just ready yet,” said Wendel, noting that by working with an upfitter Kodiak can provide a wider group of applications to customers.
“In the future, we do, of course, believe OEMs will be able to meet this need,” he said. “We want to bridge the gap in the meantime.”
Kodiak’s intended path in the coming years will involve going public as well as expanding its freight delivery deployments.
The partnership with Vay is a constituent of that, executives say.
“Assisted Autonomy provides the Kodiak Driver with more flexibility to deliver our customers’ freight in a greater range of locations and scenarios,” said Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak.
“No matter the maturity of an autonomous driving system, there are still scenarios that will benefit from human assistance, if only as a backup. Assisted Autonomy can be helpful in situations such as interpreting law enforcement hand signals.
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“Over the last year, Vay has proven the use cases for remote driving — both in [business-to-customer and business-to-business] settings. The strategic partnership with Kodiak will expand the B2B use cases to trucks,” said Thomas von der Ohe, Vay CEO.
“We are excited to partner with Kodiak to help make trucking and freight delivery safer and more efficient by marrying the value of human decision-making with autonomous operations,” he added.
That includes if one of the autonomous trucks is dealing with an atypical scenario or has a problem, according to Wendel. It could be a policeman giving hand signals or maybe there is construction underway, he added.
Kodiak has a 24/7 operations center. The operations center gets a notification if a truck comes to a halt. The truck calls the operations center. If there is a breakdown, a Kodiak Driver-enabled truck will pull over automatically, and the operations center gets a notification, Wendel said.
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