Communication between agricultural robot and mechanical weeding machine based on ISO 11783 network

Latest technologies such as advanced agriculture implements and autonomous vehicles designed with the latest sensor technologies could partially offer a solution to the challenges in agriculture that are related to crop demands, increased cost of inputs, and labor shortage. However, the compatibility, in terms of communication between the autonomous vehicle and the agricultural implements, raises the main concern. This is because most of the autonomous robotic platforms in agriculture are not compliant with existing agricultural implements that are integrated with ISO 11783 (also known as ISOBUS) standards. Besides that, there are still few agricultural processes where the implementation of ISOBUS would fulfill farmers needs to evaluate the performance of the implements. Weeding is one of those processes as it has a significant influence on crop growth. To address the mentioned issues, this work aims at integrating an agricultural robot with an existing mechanical weeder by leveraging ISOBUS in combination with software and hardware level. To fulfill the aim, this paper outlines the development of a middleware that makes communication between the mobile robot and the weeder possible. In addition to that, the development of an implement object pool (IOP) for the representation of the weeder performance, in terms of weeding quality, and its integration with the simulated electronic control unit (ECU) of the weeder is discussed. A preliminary analysis and assessment defined the threshold of 10% for the weeding quality that raised the STOP flag for the application.