IoT-Enabled Ultrasonic Sensing and Bidirectional Alert System for Blind-Curve Accident Prevention

Blind Curves on country and hilly roads are always more dangerous than straight ones because limited line-of-sight prevents drivers from perceiving oncoming vehicles, while the lack of direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Common measures such as convex mirrors and warning signs can increase driver awareness of dangerous traffic situations, however, they are unable to provide dynamic, distance-based warnings that adapt to the presence of approaching vehicles. This paper presents the design of a low-cost IoT-based early-warning system intended for accident mitigation at blind curves. The system has an Arduino Nano for decision making, an ESP8266 RF transceiver for communicating between roadside units in a short time, and HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors for an object detection at short range. A lightweight CRC-based packet protocol ensures reliable delivery of messages even in the absence of cellular or cloud connectivity. The system provides alerts at safe, caution, and critical levels considering current real-time distance thresholds. Under different lights and low foggy conditions, experimental testing gives a detection rate of 95.3%, an end-to-end delay of 0.68 s, and inter-unit latency is less than 200 ms. These results show that the proposed framework is a scalable and potential technological solution that addresses all given requirements specified above and related to future advances towards intelligent transport systems, as well as vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) solutions’ coming implementation phase.