Overview of ISOBUS implementation for specialty crop machinery

The demand for better evaluation of the crop need, cost of input, and yield prediction has significantly pushed forward the advances in developing technology and machinery to be compliant with modern sensing systems and to fulfill those demands. Even though the demand has been addressed in mainly arable farming of agriculture, there are still interoperability and compatibility issues between different autonomous vehicles and implements in many other domains of agriculture. Especially, viticulture and horticulture domains of agriculture suffer from a lack of fully ISOBUS-compliant technology such as weeding machines and sprayers for proper plant protection. Besides that, the existing robots and tractors that are not integrated with the SAE J1939 protocol in the network layer add more complexity to solving the incompliance issue. To convey approaches to the mentioned issues, this work aims to highlight an overview of a tractor-sprayer configuration that is compliant with the ISO 11783 protocol. Furthermore, a setup of an agricultural robot connected with an existing mechanical weeding that employs ISOBUS protocol for communication at the software and hardware level is examined.