Deploying Autonomous Trucks at NASA Speed

Kelly Smith, Lead Systems Engineer for Autonomy, Kodiak Robotics joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss deploying autonomous trucks at NASA speed.

Drawing on 13 years of experience engineering autonomy systems at NASA, including guidance software for the Orion spacecraft that flew to the moon and back on Artemis II, Kelly is applying aerospace-grade safety discipline to the deployment of autonomous trucks at Kodiak.

NASA’s approach to safety-critical software, including Class A flight software standards, probabilistic risk assessment, redundant flight computers, and dissimilar backup systems, is the same discipline Kodiak is applying to its autonomous operations in the Permian Basin and to its over-the-road deployment on the Dallas Fort-Worth to Atlanta lane.

Using a tool called Breakpoint to surface rare, high-consequence failure modes, Kodiak is continuously updating its risk model to responsibly burn down risk and safely scale autonomous trucking.

Episode Chapters

• 0:00 AUTNMY AI
• 0:37 13 Years of Autonomy at NASA
• 2:50 Space Latency
• 04:12 Returning to the Moon
• 06:09 Orion’s Autonomy Stack
• 10:25 NASA’s Mission-Critical Software
• 15:16 Reentry
• 19:35 Fully Autonomous Space Operations
• 24:43 Bringing NASA Rigor to Kodiak
• 28:49 Deploying Autonomous Trucks in the Permian
• 37:06 The Future of Mission-Critical Engineering