100 driverless oilfield trucks planned for Permian Basin as US firms scale fleet by 2027 Since 2024, Atlas’s driverless trucks have hauled 450,000 tons of sand across the Permian Basin on 7,000 deliveries. Read Next: Byd enters humanoid robot race with august debut Atlas Energy Solutions Inc. (Atlas) has announced that it intends to expand its autonomous truck operations in the US Permian Basin from 28 to 100 by mid-2027. The company will work with Kodiak AI, Inc. (Kodiak) to make this ambition a reality using its physical artificial intelligence (AI)-powered autonomous driving technology. What that means in practice is retrofitting or upfitting trucks with a package of sensors, controls, cameras, and other hardware to enable them to be operated autonomously using an AI “driver.” According to Atlas, the new trucks will be used to expand operations at its second load-out point along its 42-mile (68 km) “Dune Express” sand conveyor system. This system will help Atlas become more responsive to customer needs for the transport and supply of proppant in the region. Proppant, in case you are unaware, is a special grade of sand used by oil and gas companies during hydraulic fracturing. The sand is pumped underground to keep the cavities created by fracturing open, allowing oil and gas to flow freely. Delivering sand without drivers As you can appreciate, that requires enormous quantities of the stuff. What’s more, transporting it from mines or storage sites to drilling locations involves thousands of repetitive truck journeys, often on remote, dusty and relatively predictable routes. The load-out points refer to strategic locations along the so-called “Dune Express” where this sand is loaded onto trucks. At present, Atlas explains, autonomous trucks have been used from one load-out point at a time. More from AI and Robotics See All The addition of