Automated Audible Truck-Mounted Attenuator Alerts: Vision System Development and Evaluation

Background: The rise in work zone crashes due to distracted and aggressive driving calls for improved safety measures. While Truck-Mounted Attenuators (TMAs) have helped reduce crash severity, the increasing number of crashes involving TMAs shows the need for improved warning systems. Methods: This study proposes an AI-enabled vision system to automatically alert drivers on collision courses with TMAs, addressing the limitations of manual alert systems. The system uses multi-task learning (MTL) to detect and classify vehicles, estimate distance zones (danger, warning, and safe), and perform lane and road segmentation. MTL improves efficiency and accuracy, making it ideal for devices with limited resources. Using a Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN) backbone, the system enhances stability and performance. Additionally, an alert module triggers alarms based on speed, acceleration, and time to collision. Results: The model achieves a recall of 90.5%, an mAP of 0.792 for vehicle detection, an mIOU of 0.948 for road segmentation, an accuracy of 81.5% for lane segmentation, and 83.8% accuracy for distance classification. Conclusions: The results show the system accurately detects vehicles, classifies distances, and provides real-time alerts, reducing TMA collision risks and enhancing work zone safety.