DESIGN
Autonomous tractors, drones, and seed planting, weeding, and harvesting robots are several of the technologies under development that will transform agriculture and help alleviate food shortages by improving the sustainability and productivity of agricultural activities. How autonomous vehicles will improve sustainability and productivity in agriculture
By Rolf Horn, Applications Engineer, Digi-Key Electronics
While drones and agricultural robots represent new systems being developed and deployed from scratch, tractors are different. There’s already a large installed base of tractors, and they tend to have long operational lives. As a result, in addition to developing fully automated new designs, existing tractors will be retrofitted with electric drives and upgraded with digital systems for specific purposes, so-called ‘digital tractor implements’. This article looks at the development of digital tractor implements and emerging electric tractors (e-tractors). It examines some of the technologies needed to realise the development of autonomous agricultural vehicles and how Digi-Key’s product offering can help designers speed
their development processes.
Farm implements get on the ISObus Like Industry 4.0, agriculture is moving toward using intelligent and interconnected machines. That’s where International Standards Organisation (ISO) 11783, the tractors and machinery for agriculture and forestry serial data network bus, comes in. In the agriculture industry, it’s simply referred to as the ISObus. It’s based on the Society of Automotive (SAE) J1939 protocol, which includes the control area network (CAN) bus and has been optimised for agricultural applications.
The ISObus includes standardised
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