Cropinfra research data collection platform for ISO 11783 compatible and retrofit farm equipment

Abstract

The agricultural machinery produces an increasing number of measurements during operations. The primary use of these measurements is to control agricultural operations on the farm. Data that describes the in-field variation in plant growth potential and growing conditions is the basis for precision farming. The secondary use for the gathered information is documentation of work and work performance for business purposes. Researcher also benefits from the increasing measurement capabilities. Biologists and agronomists can model the crops and agronomic phenomena. Work scientists can analyse the agricultural work processes. And finally, machines with additional accurate sensors can be used for agricultural machine product development and technological research purposes. This paper concentrates on an independent research data collection platform (Cropinfra) which can be used to collect data for all above mentioned purposes. Data can be collected both from ISOBUS (ISO 11783) compliant machines as well as older and proprietary systems and stored to database for further analysis. The farm machines in Cropinfra are supplemented with extra sensors that are more accurate than existing in commercial machines. Therefore, the Cropinfra can be used as a reference measurement system to verify the correct operation of the machines as well as to produce data for biological research purposes. This paper will also present how the cloud connection of the data collection system can be realized. The solution was designed to be compatible with the existing ISO 11783-10 standard. The examples presented in this paper verify that the solution works in real farming environment. The data has been used in numerous research projects already, and in the future the data will be an important asset when machine learning and other artificial intelligence methods will be studied and utilized.