Episode 395 | Deploying Autonomous Trucks at NASA Speed

About this episode

Kelly Smith discusses the deployment of autonomous trucks at Kodiak Robotics using NASA's safety standards.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Grayson Brulte

Guest: Kelly Smith

Topics covered

• autonomous trucks
• NASA
• safety-critical software
• engineering
• risk assessment
• autonomy systems

Keywords

• autonomous trucks
• NASA
• Kodiak Robotics
• safety
• risk model
• engineering
• Orion
• Artemis II

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Kodiak Robotics, NASA, Orion, Artemis II

Places: Permian Basin, Dallas Fort-Worth, Atlanta

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