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A road safety barrier designed to eliminate the need for a worker to sit in a crash zone at roadside worksites has entered commercial service in Australia, following a four-year development process supported by ARM Hub, the country’s advanced robotics and manufacturing centre.
ProTx, the Queensland company behind the product known as the Arresta100, presented the barrier at a live demonstration event in Brisbane. The audience included representatives from road authorities, infrastructure operators and government agencies.
Ventia, one of Australia’s largest infrastructure services companies, has confirmed it will be the first commercial customer for the Arresta100. The company has committed two units to its road operations fleet, with plans for broader rollout across multiple sites.
A Persistent Risk For Road Workers
The Arresta100 is designed to address a long-standing safety problem in road construction and maintenance. Workers operating at temporary worksites in live traffic have historically been limited to two forms of protection.
The first is a static concrete crash barrier. While effective at stopping vehicles, concrete barriers are slow to deploy and largely impractical for short-term or mobile worksites where crews may need to relocate multiple times in a single shift.
The second option is a truck-mounted attenuator, or TMA. This involves stationing a dedicated vehicle at the rear of a worksite with a road worker seated inside, strapped into a five-point harness. That worker monitors a rear-view screen for the duration of an eight-hour shift, waiting for a vehicle impact that may never occur.
The TMA operator sits directly in the path of any approaching vehicle that fails to slow or stop. The role is widely regarded as one of the most physically and psychologically demanding positions in road operations.
The availability of TMA vehicles and trained operators is also a constraint, particularly for regional crews and smaller sites where the cost and logistics of dedicating a vehicle and driver to a passive protective role can be difficult to justify.
How The Arresta100 Works
The Arresta100 takes a different approach. It is a seven-metre, two-tonne barrier trailer that can be towed to a worksite behind a standard work ute and deployed in minutes. Once in position, it functions as a vehicle arrestor without requiring a dedicated operator to sit in the impact zone.
The attenuator driver, traditionally stationed at the point of greatest risk, is removed from the equation entirely.
The barrier completed seven formal crash tests during its development program. Those tests included impacts from a 2.2-tonne vehicle travelling at 100 km/h, a scenario that approximates a highway-speed collision with a mid-size passenger car or SUV.
ARM Hub’s Role In Commercialisation
ARM Hub worked with ProTx Founder John Ferguson to transition the Arresta100 from a proven prototype to a product capable of being manufactured at commercial scale.
That collaboration covered a range of production and operational challenges, including assembly process design, facility layout, procurement and inventory systems and robotic welding integration. The goal was to establish a repeatable manufacturing process that could support ongoing demand from infrastructure operators.
Professor Cori Stewart, CEO and Founder of ARM Hub, outlined the scale of the safety problem that the Arresta100 is intended to address.
“Arresta is a world-first vehicle arrestor, designed and built in Queensland to protect the workers who maintain our roads,” Stewart explained.
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“Nationally, there are around 18 fatal crashes and 245 serious injuries at roadside worksites every year. For regional crews, that risk is at least five times higher.”
Those figures underscore the occupational hazard faced by road maintenance workers across the country, with rural and regional crews bearing a disproportionate share of the risk due to higher traffic speeds and longer response times for emergency services.
Ventia’s Deployment Plans
Ventia will deploy the first Arresta100 units on the Transurban Hogan Road and Tunnel network in South East Queensland, pending authority from the Department of Transport and Main Roads (DTMR). Further deployments are planned for Ramsey, Port of Brisbane and airport sites.
Barry Smith, Ventia’s Operations Manager for Road Operations Australia, pointed to worker safety as the central factor behind the company’s decision to adopt the system.
“The biggest part for us is the safety benefit,” Smith told the audience at the Brisbane event.
“Our guys are going out there in their truck-mounted attenuators, and know that when everything goes wrong that they’re in the front line every day… this particular method means that we remove that driver out of the crash zone completely.”
Smith’s comments reflect a broader industry push to reduce the physical risk borne by individual workers in high-exposure roles. The TMA operator position, in particular, has long been a source of concern for road services contractors, with workers routinely placed in situations where they have limited ability to avoid a collision if a driver fails to observe traffic management signage.
What Motorists Can Expect
Motorists travelling through the Hogan Road and Tunnel network in South East Queensland may begin to see the Arresta100 deployed at roadside worksites in coming months.
The barrier is visually distinct from a traditional TMA setup. Rather than a manned truck positioned at the rear of a worksite, drivers will see a seven-metre trailer barrier designed to absorb vehicle impacts without placing a worker in the line of approach.
For ProTx and ARM Hub, the commercial launch with Ventia represents the transition of the Arresta100 from a Queensland-developed prototype to an operational road safety product. The partnership with one of Australia’s largest infrastructure services providers gives the barrier a pathway into the national road operations market, with the potential for adoption by other operators and authorities as deployment data accumulates.
Last Updated on June 4, 2026 by Nick Ross
