The aim of the project is to further develop the electronic drawbar for agricultural machinery in order to achieve an increased level of safety and automation with regard to driverless driving of guided agricultural machinery.
The risks that have been identified on the previous functional carrier are significantly reduced by the use of sensor technology for monitoring the surroundings and additional geoinformation. As a result, the further developed tiller system should better fulfil the legal safety requirements for unmanned machines in the field.
The first step is to research the state of the art in the field of environmental sensors and geoinformation in order to select a suitable sensor for the system. At the same time, a legally compliant risk analysis of the existing system must be carried out. The risk analysis is used to specify the requirements for the system to be further developed. Based on the requirements and the research results, concepts are developed, evaluated and tested in advance with the help of simulations. The subcomponents are then developed and tested on the basis of the selected concepts. Finally, the sub-components are integrated into the existing tiller system for functional verification and verified with regard to the requirements.
The demonstrator developed in the EDA project (completed in June 2010) will be expanded to include environment monitoring and intelligent path planning based on the environment sensors and additional geoinformation. The software and hardware required for control and communication will be transferred to vehicle control units to demonstrate functionality based on the control environment developed in the project.