Evaluation of the Implementation of ISO 11783 for 250 kbps Transmission Rate of Tractor Electronic Control Unit

Abstract

Purpose: Accurate monitoring of information from various agricultural vehicles is one of the most important factors for appropriate management strategy of field operations. While there has been a number of study and design on applications of sensors and actuators for data acquisition and control system in tractor, incompatibility between various customized hardware and software has become a major obstacle to the universal deployment in real field operation. International standard for implementation of electronic control unit (ECU) in agricultural vehicles has becoming a mandatory requirement for inter-operation compatibility in the international trade of agricultural vehicle industries. The ISO 11783 standard is basically based upon well known communication technology designated using the controller area network (CAN) bus. While CAN bus could provide 1.0 Mbps of communication speed, the standard only recommended 250 kbps. Methods: This study presents the implementation and evaluation of ISO 11783 for tractor electronic control units (TECU)with a higher transmission rate from multiple ECU than 250 kbps. Throughput and loss rate of the developed prototype were calculated across manipulated bus load for laboratory experimental tests, and the maximum requirement of transmission rate by ISO 11873 was satisfied with lower than 60% of bus load. Results: Field tests with a TECU implemented to process messages from global positioning system (GPS) receiver resulted that the root mean square error of position information was lower than 4 m with 0.5 m/s as a travelling speed. Conclusions: Results of this study represent the utilization of the international standard ISO 11783 to providepractical developments in terms with the inter-operability of TECU.

Improving ISO 11783 file transfers into mobile farm equipments using on-the-fly data compression

“…For example, in mobile farm equipments supplied with different sensors able to collect large amounts of data while working (Peets et al, 2012;Nash et al, 2009;Steinberger et al, 2009), data gathering may cause undesirable bandwidth bottlenecks. Since bandwidth is not a uniformly available resource in agricultural infrastructure (Lee et al, 2012;Herpel et al, 2009), efficient, dependable and high-speed communication systems are crucial to provide almost real-time performance and thus, to avoid system malfunctioning (Mainoo, 2012).…”