Road maintenance is a dangerous job. In 2023 and 2024 combined, 47 people died on roads in Colorado work zones, including two road crew members.
The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has turned to autonomous crash trucks to help mitigate the problem. These vehicles drive behind painting and maintenance vehicles to provide a safety buffer to traffic on the road.
CDOT purchased its first autonomous truck, backed by technology from Florida-based Kratos Defense, in 2016. Since then, it has purchased two more with the intention of continuing to deploy these vehicles. Kratos’ Autonomous Attenuator (ATMA) allows crash trucks to operate without a driver.
Heather Pickering-Hilgers, CDOT’s deputy director of mobility technology, said the program was launched on low-traffic roads in southeastern and southern Colorado. “We try to follow roads very little traveled,” he says. “We’re still keeping it out of any major metropolitan areas.”
A $1.7 million US Department of Transportation Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grant awarded to CDOT in 2022 funded the acquisition of the third vehicle. The award also funded an online toolkit to help other states launch their own ATMA programs.
“We’re working with a lot of other states,” says Pickering-Hilgers. “We hope to apply for the Stage 2 SMART grant. We’re working with a bunch of other states to expand the program, not just in Colorado, but across the country. We really feel like every state that wants one should be able to have one.” The next grant could reach $15 million, according to the USDOT website.
Military technology finds a civilian use case
Maynard Factor, Kratos’ vice president of business development, said the ATMA technology grew out of the company’s core market of providing autonomous vehicles to the military. He attended a Florida Department of Transportation event around 2010 that alerted him to the concept of wrecked trucks. “I saw this as a great way to adapt our driverless technology into the commercial space and aligned with Kratos’ strategy of offering dual-use technologies,” says Factor.
Factor later connected with Pennsylvania-based Royal Truck and Equipment, a leading supplier of crash trucks. “Within a week, I had a truck and we automated it,” he says. “It was the first that had ever been done.”
ATMA uses GPS and inertial navigation for autonomous driving as Kratos evaluates optical navigation systems. The systems also have fully redundant backup communications technology with “military-grade encryption,” says Factor.
A soft launch in Pennsylvania followed in 2014, then a UK-based company was the first contract for an ATMA for a paying customer, also in 2014. “The next contract I got was with the Colorado Department of Transportation,” he says.
CDOT staff “were already aligned with a technology innovation program, and this ATMA project fits very well into that program,” says Factor. “They had a dedicated team to evaluate the technology, validate it in the use case, and make recommendations for continuous improvement of the technology and capabilities. They were basically subject matter experts in how they did highway maintenance, and they had a very strong team in vehicle automation technologies.”
Factor says Kratos has since deployed 15 systems in other states, including Missouri, North Dakota, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma and California. Colorado has the most with three, and Missouri is second with two systems.
Some states have a safety engine on the truck. “The main reason for this is that the legislation has not yet caught up with the technology in these places to allow a driverless, 36,000-pound truck on the road,” explains Factor.
There’s plenty of room for growth in Colorado and beyond, he adds. Colorado has about 100 legacy crash trucks in 10 regions, and there are near-term plans to deploy an autonomous vehicle in each district. “A long-term goal is to have a solid percentage of these automated vehicles for workers to use and deploy in their normal daily activity,” says Factor.
Pickering-Hilgers says Kratos has been a fantastic partner for CDOT. “We’re just trying to make it better every time,” he notes. “Our vendor has been very pleasant to work with [Kratos]and tell them what works and what doesn’t. Each one has gotten a little better in terms of their sensors and cameras and things like that, so we’re continuing to refine it and they’re listening to us, which is great.”
