Developing an IoT-Enabled Cloud Management Platform for Agricultural Machinery Equipped with Automatic Navigation Systems

Smart farming uses advanced tools and technologies such as intelligent agricultural machines, high-precision sensors, navigation systems, and sophisticated computer systems to increase the economic benefits of agriculture and reduce the associated human effort. With the increasing demands of individualized farming operations, the internet of things is a crucial technique for acquiring, monitoring, processing, and managing the agricultural resource data of precision agriculture and ecological monitoring domains. Here, an internet of things-based system scheme integrating the most recent technologies for designing a management platform for agricultural machines equipped with automatic navigation systems is proposed. Various agricultural machinery cyber-models and their corresponding sensor nodes were constructed in a pre-production phase. Three key enabling technologies—multi-optimization of agricultural machinery scheduling, development of physical architecture and software, and integration of the controller-area-network with a mobile network—were addressed to support the system scheme. A demonstrative prototype system was developed and a case study was used to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.