IAV Industry Focus Off-Highway Commercial Vehicles and Agriculture

Off-Highway Commercial Vehicles and Agriculture

Agriculture is facing major challenges worldwide. Increasing food demand, climate change, finite resources, a shortage of skilled workers and, last but not least, environmental protection are factors that have an extreme influence on agriculture. State-of-the-art technology can help meet the challenges – and IAV has solutions for the agriculture of the future in this sector.

Due to the growing demand of the world for food supply and the finite and already developed resources of agricultural land, increases in yields can only be achieved through the efficient use of machinery, plants and arable land. The visible shortage of skilled workers or even pandemic events cause additional bottlenecks during harvest campaigns and seasonal requirements. At the same time, we must also protect our environment and preserve it in the long term. The use of pesticides and herbicides, soil compaction of heavy agricultural machinery and emissions from internal combustion engines using fossil fuels play an obvious role. Depending on the application, social, political and economic criteria will determine where larger individual machines and where machine waste heat are used.

However, it is certain that such solutions, regardless of their expected characteristics, require further automation of the machines and devices, their networking, new sensor technology and sensor evaluations, as well as the creation of novel drive concepts. Only with special and adapted solutions can the social challenges with regard to environmental pollution and productivity increase be met. However, it is certain that such solutions, regardless of their expected characteristics, require further automation of the machines and devices, their networking, new sensor technology and sensor evaluations, as well as the creation of novel drive concepts.

In many ways, the agricultural industry is the pioneer of new techniques and technologies – always from the point of view of increasing productivity, reliability and efficiency. This is an additional and particularly significant challenge from an economic and social point of view. And then there are still wishes for which there is no acceptable solution today. Consider the automated picking of fruits, the recognition of weeds and their targeted mechanical control.

"IAV is working intensively on many of these topics."

For 20 years, IAV has been developing and supplying devices for the visualization of complex machine data, the control of the machine, for the acquisition, storage and processing of the data of the precision farming right up to the ISO terminal. A WLAN version of the ISO terminal developed after ISO25119 was also implemented for an OEM, which can be run on tablets using a special ISO bus adapter.

Since functional safety is indispensable for the placing on the market of machines, IAV advises and develops in all facets of the relevant standards. This is where the cooperation between the subdivisions within IAV is particularly important. Due to its long-term experience, IAV has extensive knowledge of ISO25119 – especially agricultural technology – and the ISO13849, which is often used in the construction machinery industry. In addition, design-related safety requirements of the ISO18497 are also taken into account, for example in the development of agricultural robots.

In the field of environmental perception, an essential key component for highly automated or autonomous operation of vehicles, IAV can also draw on many years of extensive expertise. Environmental sensors for off-road applications, the fusion of data from different sources as well as the evaluation of this information using classical algorithms or the use of artificial neural networks are just some of the functions that IAV has already brought to a successful end in a number of projects.

The topic of electrification in agricultural machinery represents a special challenge due to the high required continuous power. The 500kW drive power of a forage harvester cannot be reliably represented by battery power. However, such solutions can even be implemented battery-electrically, from the yard loader to the small tractor.

Since many different types of construction and electrical connection and capacitance variants are required, IAV develops a scalable HV battery system. IAV can adapt this to the different machines with significantly reduced costs and also provides the necessary technology for integration.

For greater power output, IAV draws on a comprehensive knowledge of fuel cells or the thermal processes of hydrogen-powered classic engines. In both variants, the hydrogen tank systems and the necessary technology are certainly a development task. IAV develops such tank systems from consulting services, through the associated safety and control technology to the design of the basic tanks.

Find out more about what is currently driving us on the topic of off-highway commercial vehicles & agriculture.

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