Currently agricultural machines and tractors cannot exchange data between themselves and back-end IT systems without reliable cellular network coverage, which is problematic in some remote areas. Data exchange between agricultural machines and tractors though is beneficial to enable machine autonomy and coordinated manoeuvring, to share fleet management information between the vehicles and their back-end infrastructure.

V2ROADS supplies V2X vehicle devices that can be installed on agricultural machines and tractors, either pre-installed by the OEM or fitted by aftermarket service agents. We will deploy V2X wireless communication to enable data exchange between agricultural machines and tractors in a peer-to-peer mode in areas without cellular network coverage. Some of the vehicles may be used as intermediate data-forwarding gateways to send the information from the source node to the destination node (nodes). Additionally, some of the agricultural equipment may also be equipped with cellular network modems to connect to the back-end over 3G/4G/5G networks.

V2ROADS' advantages in deploying such V2X infrastructure in an agricultural application is as follows:

Widespread operating environment – the communication distance between two vehicles is up to two kilometers, so the application can be deployed over a wide geographical area and varying terrains.