Remote ISOBUS telematics in agricultural environment

Abstract

Many agricultural equipment manufacturers are mainly hardware providers, and the product life cycle services are limited to machine maintenance and spare parts. However, the modern wireless technologies makes it possible to access machines in their working environment, thus enabling many new applications. Accessing machines also requires accessing their internal communications network, which in agricultural machines is increasingly often ISOBUS. The purpose of this thesis is to study the available telematics information and interfaces in an ISOBUS system, and also the applications this informations makes possible. Based on this information telematics functionalities are selected and implemented to Wapice Remote Management (WRM) system. Especially the standard manufacturer independent interfaces provided by ISO 11783 standard, in which the ISOBUS is based on, are studied. The thesis is divided into three main parts. First, the current state-of-the-art is presented followed by usage examples for the telematics system which also highlights the main requirements for the system in whole. Thereafter, the second part introduces SAE J1939 protocol in which the ISOBUS is based on. The main concepts of the ISOBUS protocol are also introduced, and the ISOBUS is compared to other common CAN-based protocols. The results for the study of available information sources in an ISOBUS system as well as a general example reference architecture for the system are presented. In the third part the implementation of ISOBUS support in WRM system and the implementation of ISOBUS telematics functionalities is presented. The results of this thesis suggest that the ISO 11783 standard provides many functionalities and interfaces that can be used to collect telematics as well as process information in a manufacturer independent way. This is a key factor when developing a generic system. The implementation for the WRM system also shows that it is possible to integrate ISOBUS telematics in an existing remote management system