Next to industrial solutions, process engineering and building automation, energy technology has become an important industry sector. Another field is evolving greatly without attracting much attention: automation of mobile machinery and special-purpose vehicles.
The market for construction machinery and agricultural machinery has been developing well for years, and the growth prognoses for the next years are certainly optimistic. This development sends a good message to automation manufacturers active in the field.
I’m currently attending a conference on “Electrical components and electronics in mobile machinery,” the first of its kind in Germany. It takes place during a general symposium on electronics in passenger cars, commercial vehicles and mobile machines. More than 500 people attend the event in total, with over 100 of them attending the aforementioned symposium on mobile automation of work machinery.
Although the conference focuses on agricultural machinery and construction machinery, the field is much wider than that and includes municipal vehicles, fire fighting vehicles, railway vehicles, watercraft and others.
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The best example for the evolution of mobile automation might be tractors. Nowadays, they have become high-tech devices, as a speech given by John Deere at the conference made obvious. Inside a higher quality tractor, more than 20 controller units are to be found: touch screen displays, steer by wire and telematics systems included. Several parallel CAN bus strings and several miles of cables are installed. Interconnectivity is of very high significance in the field and takes precedence in the field. The trend moves towards Ethernet, as is already established in the industrial automation sector. EtherCAT is the most often named real-time solution.
The beginnings of machine-to-machine communication (M2M) are interesting to observe as well. Fendt is currently developing a solution that has a driverless tractor following a manned guiding tractor on a parallel path. The driver is constantly informed about the guided vehicle’s status and is of course also able to operate it and ensure its safe status.
This brings us to the next important topic: functional safety. Because of the increasing use of wire-connected and wireless networking, safety goes hand in hand with access security. The conference’s second day will predominantly cover those themes.
It is extremely fascinating observing how mobile automation for mobile engines and devices develops further. We are just at the beginning of our journey, and it is definitely worth it to keep an eye on the developments and, hopefully, see them through. Automation is becoming more mobile—we have an exiting future ahead of us.
Martin Buchwitz, [email protected], is Editor in Chief of SPS-Magazin in Germany.
