Development of ISO 11783 Compliant Agricultural Systems: Experience Report

The connection of different modules from different manufacturers into a single bus for the exchange of data and control is a challenge for the agricultural machinery industry using ISO 11783 standards (called ISOBUS in the market). It shows strong potential to become the de facto standard for the exchange of data between modules on the agricultural tractor. This research presents the development of an ISOBUS monitoring system and virtual terminal (VT) for agricultural vehicles. The graphical user interface (GUI) of VT is developed on the embedded system by using the Qt with cross-platform for an ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor named by Freescale i.MX6 Quad. The GUI application programs were developed based on the Isocore-suite commercial library by the OSB AG Engineering company and certified by the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation. The implemented electronic control units (ECUs) and ISOBUS monitoring system were developed by the ISOAgLib open-source library, in addition to tools such as the vt-designer, the vt2iso, the CAN server, the CAN messenger, and the CAN logalizer. The implementation of ISOAgLib is fully compatible with the ISO 11783 standard. The hardware implementation is the development board for the STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. The implemented ECUs were experimentally tested on the ISO 11783-compliant intelligent monitoring system AFS Pro 700 for the New Holland Agriculture tractor. Also, we simulated VT-Server and implemented the sprayer, the manure spreader, the global positioning system modules with the Kvaser PCIe CAN device, and PCAN-USB device in order to analyze all CAN messages and network protocols such as the transport protocol (TP), extended transport protocol (ETP), address claiming, and request parameter group number (PGN) messages. Finally, we present an ISOBUS object pool (IOP) binary file from the implemented ECU and an interpretation of IOP files shown on the CONLAB-VT.