Autonomous Truck Stop Opens in Georgia
Are you ready for the future? It is still numerous decades away, but that is not stopping Kodiak Robotics from forming a partnership with the Pilot Company to create a station that will support autonomous vehicles.
Details
The new station is located on a standard truck stop in Villa Rica, Georgia. The planned uses for it include refueling, maintenance if necessary, and to act as a spot for drivers to pick up or drop off the truck before or after an autonomous journey on the highway.
Both Kodiak Robotics and Pilot are ecstatic about the new project.
“Partnering with Pilot Company to build the Villa Rica truckport ensures that we have access to the truckport services we need, utilizing Pilot’s industry-leading travel center network,” said Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics. At the same time, director of strategy and business development at Pilot Company Brandon Trama says that autonomous trucking will bring about a higher quality of life for truckers, rather than detract from it. “Working with Kodiak aligns with our emphasis on improving the quality of life for professional drivers,” Trama says. “Autonomous trucks focus on the long, repeatable highway miles, leaving the more enticing local, first- and last-mile deliveries for professional drivers who can stay closer to home.”
Conclusion
With autonomous commercial vehicles being exceptionally rare in 2023, the station will primarily be used to test Kodiak’s trucks as they travel from the headquarters in Dallas-Fort Worth to the new facility.
If Kodiak Robotics eventually has its way, the trucking industry will look completely different in a few decades. Truckers will handle the trucks on surface streets rather than on boring stretches of highway, enabling them to do a dozen short deliveries in a single day rather than one delivery, traveling thousands of miles, in a single week. It will be quite the change in the trucking industry landscape, but saving autonomous driving solely for long stretches of predictable highway helps mitigate the problem of the onboard computer adapting to dynamic road conditions. Regardless, there is still a lot of work to be done before people trust an onboard system of cameras to operate an 80,000 pound truck.
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