Automation and Remote Control of an Aquatic Harvester Electric Vehicle

Abstract

Electric boats are evolving, following the trend of imposing electric powered vehicles in all transportation solutions. For a research project, a reed and aquatic weed harvester, the author’s goal is to develop an experimental electrical vehicle aimed at solving several particular problems such as: small speed, big throttle, high maneuverability, big load capacity, small draught and affordable cost. The solution comprises of one electric motor powered by a converter supplied from Li-Ion batteries, which drives a hydraulic pump for simultaneous operation of two lateral-placed paddle wheels and one complex mechanism of cutter and conveyor. The control system of this vehicle consists of one remote controller, with bidirectional radio communication to three on-board controllers used for the management of the electro-hydraulic actuators, the electric motor and the battery storage system. The hardware and the software architectures are presented, underlining the automated operations designed to increase the safety, the maneuverability and the predictability of the vehicle. The advantages of the use of control electronics is the increasing operability of the vehicle by supervising the available stored energy and the predicted consumption of energy, the fast and remote assistance in case of operational failure using online diagnose and the operation optimization by selecting the best load profile for the cutter and for the paddles. The results of this research are the validation of the proposed hardware and software architectures used for the control of an electro-hydraulic vehicle and the feasibility of using radio communication and remote diagnose for vehicle control.

Optimization of the Electronic Control Unit of Electric-Powered Agricultural Vehicles

“…As an experimental setup, we developed a control unit as presented in Figure 12b, similar to the one presented in [17], and that designed for the control of a small power full electric tractor, previously presented in [16]. The event memory is set up so that it will record any event from the I/O, from the communication interface COM, or from internal memory INT.…”

“…As an experimental setup, we developed a control unit as presented in Figure 12b, similar to the one presented in [17], and that designed for the control of a small power full electric tractor, previously presented in [16].…”

“…As an experimental setup, we developed a control unit as presented in Figure 12b, similar to the one presented in [17], and that designed for the control of a small power full electric tractor, previously presented in [16]. The experimental work was not performed on a real electric tractor, but we created the inputs on the electronic test system of the electric tractor from Figure 12a, which was initially developed to estimate the power consumption from the electric storage in various agricultural tasks, such as plowing, planting, and traveling on flat or sloped terrain.…”

“…On the basis of previous work [16,17], the authors present the design and optimization of an electronic control unit for the full-electric tractor, emphasizing the software design described using logical diagrams. The integration of devices such as GPS, modern communication interfaces such as the universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART), serial bus complying with RS485 hardware standards, controller area network (CAN bus), drive train and battery monitoring, real-time monitoring of hydraulic operating parameters, and trace memory functionality for diagnosis, parameters, commands, and operating statuses is also presented.…”