A General Monitoring Platform For Agricultural Machinery

In recent years, with the continuous improvement of agricultural mechanization,enlargement has become the developing direction of the modern agriculturalmachinery. As the structure, the motion mechanism and the working process are muchmore complex, it puts forward higher requirements of the operators’skill to ensure thework quality of the machinery. In order to adapt to this situation, a variety ofautomation equipment that used to monitoring the working process of agriculturalmachinery have been developed to reduce operator fatigue and to improve theworking quality. Actually, automation equipment has become an important part ofmodern agricultural machinery, it also promote the intelligent development of theagricultural machinery. At present, most of the monitoring systems are developed fora specific task. A monitoring syetem for this task can not be applied to another task.The hardware and software resource cann’t be reused. In order to improve theutilization of hardware resources, to shorten the development cycle of the newmonitoring system, a general monitoring platform for agricultural machinery whichcan be reuse in multiple tasks has been developed in this study.The general monitoring platform which has been developed in this study consistsof monitoring terminal, functional nodes and communication network. The CAN fieldbus is used as the communication network in the platform. The monitoring terminal isused for the control parameters input and working process information summary,processing, display and storage. The functional node is designed for a specific task. Inthe working process, the functional node carries out its task according to its designfunction. It sends the working process parameters to the CAN bus at the same time.The monitoring terminal captures these working process parameters, and thenprocesses, displays and stores them.The monitoring terminal consists of mainboard, microcontroller, CANtransceiver board, man-machine interactive system and power system. The functionalnode consists of microcontroller, sensor, actuator, CAN controller and CANtransceiver. To ensure the monitoring platform is opened and has good expansibility, the protocol of the communication network is designed based on the internationalstandard ISO11783.A tillage depth monitoring functional node and a variable rate fertilization(VRF)functional node have been developed to verify the feasibility of the monitoringplatform. In the laboratory test of tillage monitoring function, the maximum absoluteerror is6.2mm, and the maximum relative error is3.50%. In the field test, themaximum absolute error is11.3mm, and the maximum relative error is7.40%. In thefield test of the VRF functional node, the maximum relative error is13.61%, and themean relative error is9.61%. Both the Laboratory test and the field test show that themonitoring platform work stable and reliable, and has reached the designrequirements.The study of the general monitoring platform for agricultural machinery providesa solution for improving the reusable of the monitoring devices of the agriculturalmachinery, it has a certain application value.