august2021 - 32

monitoring? Particularly, following the recent
investment in the company from Bridgestone,
can you expand on what such technology offers
Kodiak from an operational perspective?
DG: We use a variety of different telematics
platforms, including off-the-shelf. We also have
developed our own system that allows us to
remotely monitor what's happening on the truck
and gives us a level of detail that you'd expect for
autonomous trucks; it really goes beyond what is
common in the industry.
In the long run, having access to those kinds of
telematics platforms are critical. First, to maintain
the safety of the vehicle, we've implemented
Bridgestone's tire pressure monitoring systems,
and those are important to making sure that our
tires are operating the way they should be on
the road and allow us to take corrective action
if they're not.
These sensors also are going to have a real
impact on our maintenance processes to go
beyond just monitoring. One of the things we're
excited about working on with Bridgestone is
connecting the data from their sensors to the
information we collect about how our vehicle
is behaving on the road, which we hope will
allow us to get much more detailed information
about what actually causes tire wear and tear,
what kinds of pressures cause tire breakdowns
and cause other issues with tires. Being able to
connect those two datasets, we think, will allow
Bridgestone to build tires better suited to the
needs of autonomous trucks, and will also help
us reduce wear and tear on the tires and do a
better job of doing preventive maintenance.
These sensors are all critical to us understanding
the operations of the vehicles, but they also
will allow us to do all sorts of things to reduce
our spend and reduce the costs of maintenance.
to have a high level of certainty about how tires
are behaving on the road. But the benefits, and
what we learn from this, are going to be pretty
broad. Most of these technologies are not unique
to autonomy. We are using traditional trucking
platforms. These telematics systems are available
in the market. That's going to be really exciting
for all kinds of fleets to see what they can learn.
FM: As Kodiak is monitoring its autonomous
» Kodiak Robotics, an autonomous technology
company focused on long-haul trucking, is
developing SAE Level 4 autonomous trucks with
a fleet mostly consisting of Kenworth T680s.
" For the most part, our
system is a smoother
driver than a human,
which means less
wear and tear. "
Dan Goff, head of policy
for Kodiak Robotics
FM: From a maintenance perspective-having
absolute predictive maintenance and knowing
exactly how one system's operation is going to
impact the wear and tear on another-that's the
ultimate goal, isn't it?
DG: A lot of this is going to benefit traditional
fleets as well. On the maintenance side of things,
a lot of what we're talking about is not unique to
autonomous trucks. We're leaning a little forward
on some things because we need to be. We need
operations, has it shed any light on the implications
autonomous operation has on wear items
on a vehicle?
DG: For the most part, our system is a smoother
driver than a human, which means less wear and
tear. Generally, our system doesn't break as hard
or as aggressively; it accelerates more smoothly.
That tends to lean towards reducing wear and tear.
On the flip side-today, we have a safety driver
in the vehicle at all times, but when we begin to
operate driverlessly, the goal will be to use the
asset as intensively as possible. We're aiming to
operate 24/7, minus time for swapping trailers
and fueling the truck. That is going to create some
new maintenance requirements and changes as
well. As we get closer to driverless, we're going
to be looking to simulate the environment of as
close to 24/7 driving as possible. To some extent
there's some knowledge available already from
team driving operations, but there's definitely a
lot that we're going to need to work on if we get
to that point where we're deploying [driverlessly].
The wear and tear per mile will probably be less
than on a traditional truck. But given the intensity
of driving, I think the overall impact is that the
trucks will probably need to be maintained more
frequently given how many hours a day they're
spending on the road.
We have spent a lot of time thinking about that.
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august2021

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