Adapting an industrial automation protocol to remote monitoring of mobile agricultural machinery: a combine harvester with IoT

摘要

Abstract: Remote monitoring of any mobile machine requires radio technology, Internet technology, protocols and applications. Mobile cellular networks provide both radio and communication for Internet services while the protocols for IoT are under development. A protocol used in industrial automation for connecting machine automation to production process control is OPC (Open Platform Communications). The latest version of this technology is OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). In this paper, the suitability of this technology for agricultural machinery telemetry application is studied. The case presented is a combine harvester with a yield monitoring system. The paper presents both the server side system in the combine harvester and the client for remote monitoring. The results include the measured latencies of the system. The detected end-to-end latency over the Internet connection was less than 250 ms, which is sufficient for most telemetry applications in agriculture.