US firm's tech to turn powerful military vehicles into driverless beast

California-based Kodiak AI is developing an advanced autonomous driving system, called the Kodiak Driver, to be integrated into the U.S. Marine Corps’ Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires (ROGUE-Fires) carrier ground vehicle. This AI-powered system combines sophisticated software with modular hardware to enable scalable, real-world autonomy, aiming to extend operational reach, improve tempo, and reduce risks to Marines during high-end expeditionary missions. Kodiak emphasizes the system’s maturity and modularity, leveraging existing software stacks and hardware interfaces to demonstrate its adaptability in unstructured and unmapped environments. The Kodiak Driver features continuous dual-path planning—a primary route and a backup fallback—to handle real-world uncertainties, with redundancy built into compute, power, sensing, and actuation layers. Each vehicle is equipped with multiple SensorPods containing cameras, LiDARs, and radars, ensuring overlapping fields of view even if hardware fails. Powered by deep neural networks trained across diverse environments, the unified AI