Offline mesh network for heavy-haul convoy alerts.

Why not just use phones?

Because the places where a bridge strike is most likely are the places phones stop working. Mountain passes drop signal. Rural corridors have coverage gaps measured in miles. Private industrial sites and port terminals often have no public coverage at all, by design. A safety system that depends on a cell connection is a safety system that fails exactly where you need it.

There is also a latency argument. Even with perfect coverage, a round trip through a carrier network and a cloud service is not a sub-100 ms guarantee. A local radio mesh is.

How the mesh works

Each Convoy Guardian node in the convoy is a peer. They discover each other and form the network themselves — there is no base station to set up and nothing to configure at the staging area. Each device relays alerts onward to the next, so the convoy's own length becomes the network's range rather than a limit on it.

• Self-configuring — nodes form the mesh on power-up, with no manual pairing
• Peer relay — every device extends the network for the ones behind it
• Under 100 ms — detection to crew-wide alert, independent of cell, internet, or GPS
• Zero infrastructure — nothing to install along the route

Who gets alerted

Everyone in the session, at the same time. That is the part crews notice first: today, when an escort sees a clearance problem, they reach for a radio and talk to one person. On the mesh, the driver, the lead escort, the trailing escort, and anyone else who scanned into the session all receive it simultaneously. Crew join by QR code in under 30 seconds — no accounts, no downloads.

What happens when connectivity comes back

Nothing changes operationally — the mesh never depended on it. What connectivity is used for is syncing the blackbox log to your fleet office when it becomes available. Real-time alerts and mesh coordination are offline-first by design; the upload is an afterthought, which is the correct order of priorities for a safety system.

Both detection methods feed the same mesh

Whether the trigger is a LiDAR clearance reading below threshold or the smart impact pole registering contact, the alert path and the log entry are identical. Compare the two methods.