All projects 2018 - 2022

Connecting Self-Driving Farm Vehicles to a Farm Management System

Zühlke Engineering GmbH

Agricultural Machinery - Connection to Farm Management System
Case Study

Challenge, Approach, Outcome

1

Challenge

Self-driving farm vehicles needed to exchange machine data with a cloud farm management system while delivering high-precision GPS positions for automated steering.

2

Approach

Yocto-based ECU firmware in Modern C++: aggregation of CAN and ISOBUS data, compression and MQTT transfer to Azure IoT Hub, GPS positioning with NTRIP correction, OTA updates, and Jenkins CI with GoogleTest and behave tests.

3

Outcome

The vehicles gained automated steering with centimetre-level positioning and seamless farm management connectivity — on a maintainable, license-compliant software base.

Technology

Technologies Used

YoctoLinuxModern C++PythonCMakeDockerJenkinsGPSNTRIPCANIsobusAzure IoT HubAzure Blob StorageMQTTGoogleTestbehaveModem / AT-CommandsOTA UpdateArchitecture & DesignSW-Licenses
Details

Project Description

Develop an electronic control unit, which collects several vehicular data from CAN (ECUs) and Isobus (Implements). The collected data is aggregated on the device, compressed and transferred to a cloud hosted farm management system (Azure IoT Hub) via MQTT.

Additionally, the device functions as a GPS receiver for self-driving purposes. To achieve a higher precision, the position is corrected via NTRIP base stations.

The ECU operating system is an embedded Linux utilizing Yocto.

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