Ikea to debut autonomous middle mile delivery
Ikea is moving out of a four-year pilot of autonomous driving technology into full deployment.
The Sweden-based global furniture giant will roll out driverless trucks from Kodiak in its U.S. supply chain later this year. Ikea will be the first company to fully launch Kodiak’s driverless freight capabilities with no human safety observer in the cab. The initial driver-out leg will cover 219 miles, primarily along Interstate 45 between Kodiak’s Houston and Dallas-area facilities.
This is part of the established 292-mile delivery route connecting the Ikea distribution center in Baytown with the Ikea store in Frisco, Texas. The deployment follows a four-year pilot Ikea and Kodiak initially launched covering this route in 2022.
[READ MORE: Ikea in driverless delivery pilot]
During the four-year pilot, Kodiak has delivered more than 1,300 loads and logged more than 750,000 miles while autonomously carrying Ikea goods with a safety observer aboard. Ikea reports the driverless trucks ran seven days a week, night and day, rain and shine, with a nearly perfect on-time delivery record and no safety incidents.
According to Kodiak, the pilot has allowed it to learn when and where trucks should be launched and what time they will arrive in Frisco so unloading can be scheduled at a specific dock door; as well as collect predictive maintenance data insights and establish proactive maintenance plans for trucks.
Ahead of rollout, Kodiak is completing a highway launch safety case for driverless long-haul operations. The safety case is a structured, evidence-backed argument that the Kodiak Driver autonomous driving system, is safe to operate without a human on board in a defined operating area.
“Unsupervised driverless operations – no human in the cab – represent a milestone the entire Kodiak team has been tirelessly working toward since Kodiak was founded more than eight years ago,” Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak, said in a corporate blog post. “We are now only months away, and we could not be more excited to have IKEA as our partner on this journey."
Kodiak is currently undergoing its final checks in preparation for launch with Ikea.
Retailers test autonomy in the ‘middle mile’
The middle mile is the point in the supply chain where goods travel between warehouses or from a warehouse to a “last mile” pickup point. Walmart became the first company to use autonomous delivery trucks with no safety driver in the middle mile of its supply chain in a deployment it launched with Gatik vehicles in November 2021.
And in October 2022, Canadian grocer Loblaw Companies Ltd. partnered with Gatik to transport orders for its PC Express buy-online-pickup-in-store service using multi-temperature autonomous box trucks, without a human safety driver.
Other examples include grocery giant Kroger, which uses medium-duty autonomous trucks to transport fresh products from a fulfillment center in Dallas to multiple grocery stores in that market.
Ingka Group is a strategic partner in the Ikea franchise system, operating 375 Ikea stores in 30 countries – including 51 retail locations in the U.S.
