In the rugged, remote oilfields of West Texas, autonomous trucks are now working alongside human-operated machinery, hauling loads of frac sand in the oil- and natural gas-rich Permian Basin.
The trucks are owned and operated by Atlas Energy Solutions, a proppant and oilfield logistics provider. The technology comes from AV tech startup Kodiak Robotics. It marks not only Kodiak’s first commercial deployment, but what the startup says is the AV trucking sector’s first customer delivery.
“This is a monumental step for Kodiak. It’s a monumental step for the industry,” Kodiak CEO and founder Don Burnette told Tech Brew. “This is the first time that a customer has owned a driverless vehicle. So it’s really significant not only from a technological achievement perspective, but also from a customer, operational deployment perspective.”
Texas haul ’em: Atlas now has two Kodiak RoboTrucks in its 120-vehicle fleet and is putting the trucks to use on a 42-mile autonomous conveyor system used to deliver sand to customers.
Adding autonomous trucks to its fleet “is a significant advancement in the automation of our business, enhancing our ability to maintain a fundamentally safe and reliable service at the best price for our customers,” Atlas CEO John Turner said in a statement.
Atlas said in a release that it has already delivered 100 loads of its primary product, proppant (a type of sand used in the fracking industry), using the autonomous trucks.
Kodiak tested the RoboTrucks with Atlas for months leading up to the commercial launch.
One aspect of Kodiak’s tech that Burnette said he feels suited Atlas’s use case well is that its AV technology does not employ HD mapping, which provides a high-definition view of the environment around an AV.
“Our system has learned to drive in environments without using a preexisting HD map,” he said. “That’s really important in off-road and unstructured environments, because the way that mapping technology works is you go in and you build a three-dimensional view of the world to high detail. That’s great if there are buildings around, and lamps and posts and things that are fixed to the ground and curbs, and all this kind of stuff that generally doesn’t move.”
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“Out in the middle of the desert, that doesn’t apply,” he added.
What’s next: Kodiak will remain involved in Atlas’s deployments, even setting up an office in Odessa, Texas, to provide support.
Until now, Kodiak has been operating autonomous truck fleets on behalf of customers. Now, with Atlas, it’s moving to a business model where it provides the underlying tech platform and related services for a fee, rather than operating a fleet itself.
The startup is eyeing other ambitions, too, including proving out the safety case for taking drivers out of the truck for long-haul routes on highways, and dipping its toes into other industrial use cases, like mining and logging.
“This technology is applicable broadly. There are many different applications beyond just the Permian Basin and what we do with Atlas,” Burnette said. “We’ve had a lot of conversations within logging. It’s very remote work; generally unstructured; unimproved roads; very tedious from a human driving perspective; and very much in the wheelhouse of automation.”
And Kodiak also will be helping Atlas automate more of its fleet.
“There are thousands of vehicles being deployed throughout the Permian, and we certainly plan to automate those vehicles,” Burnette said. “And over the next several years, I think you’re going to see a fairly significant deployment of RoboTrucks, both in Texas and beyond.”