LiDAR lead-vehicle sensing is Convoy Guardian's proactive detection method. A vehicle-mounted LiDAR sensor sweeps the overhead clearance continuously as the lead truck approaches a structure and reads the gap to ±2 mm. When a reading drops below the threshold set for the load, it fires the offline mesh — alerting every crew member in under 100 milliseconds, before the load ever reaches the bridge. It is part of Convoy Guardian, made by SolTec Innovation.
The sensor rides on the lead vehicle and scans upward and forward while the convoy is in motion. It is measuring one thing continuously: how much vertical room exists between the road surface and whatever is above it. That reading streams live, so the crew is not waiting for a single snapshot at the last moment — they are watching a number fall as they approach.
You configure a threshold from your load height plus the margin you want. The moment a reading crosses it, the mesh fires. Because the lead vehicle is ahead of the load, that alert arrives with road left to stop on — which is the entire point of a predictive method.
A contact-based method, by definition, tells you a strike is happening. LiDAR tells you one is about to. Nothing touches the structure, nothing is damaged, no permit review is triggered, and the convoy stops or reroutes on its own terms. On a permitted route where the structures were surveyed in advance, this is the method that keeps the move clean.
Where the approach is skewed, the structure was never surveyed, or the site was never mapped, pair it with — or fall back to — the smart impact pole. The two methods fail in different conditions, which is why running both is the strongest configuration.
The LiDAR sensor is carried by the Convoy Guardian Node, the IP67 head unit that also joins the offline mesh. Every reading — not just the ones that trigger alerts — is written to the blackbox, so a permit reviewer can see the full clearance profile of the move, structure by structure.
The ±2 mm figure is the same precision standard SolTec applies across the ecosystem: MeasurePRO captures route clearances at highway speed to the same tolerance, and RoadScope plans against them. Convoy Guardian is the layer that verifies it in the field, live, while the load is moving.
Book a demo on a corridor you actually run, with your load height.
Tell us about your convoy. We'll set up a live demo on a real route — or meet you at Booth M01 at Breakbulk Americas.
We reply within one business day — usually sooner. If it is urgent, reach us directly at contact@soltec.ca.