The Road to Autonomy Episode 395 | 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
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