Smart implements by leveraging ISOBUS: Development and evaluation of field applications

Increased labor scarcity and input costs, as well as the demand for ecologically more sound control of growing conditions while maintaining yield and quality in both viticulture as well as horticulture have proliferated the requirements for the current technologies such as implements and autonomous vehicles used in these domains. The increasing employment of such technology, however, brings up the issue of compatibility, in terms of data exchange, connectivity, and communication between the implements and autonomous vehicles used. Besides that, conducting the connection and communication in a standardized means adds more complexity to the issue. To properly address the above-mentioned issue, this work focused on developing a middleware that introduced the ISO 11783 standard-based communication to the setup for both, a weeder robot and a combination of a sprayer and a retrofitted tractor. The developed middleware also considered the information exchange with external systems such as real-time decision-making sensor systems and a farming controller to accurately carry out the field applications of weeding and spraying. The correctness of the weeding quality computation and the spraying coverage indicating the performance of the developed setups were verified before conducting in-field applications. The subsequent in-field weeding application indicated an adequate evaluation of the weeding quality with a variation from 94 to 100 % and zeros in the regions of the weeding path where the weeding was not necessary. The assessment of the spraying applications based on the comparison between the prescribed and the as-applied information showed a mean value of 1.08 x 104 mm3 m-2 for the absolute deviation from the maximum prescribed rate. Further analyses indicated that the as-applied rate varied with a deviation of 10 % during the field application, which was below the defined threshold.