For the European shortliners, working together harnesses global skills to put Combined Powers to work in farmers’ fields
Krone and Lemken teamed up to build a robotic tractor and implements that will help the companies keep pace with the autonomous revolution expected to sweep the agricultural sector.
Combined Powers is the name of the joint project. Yves Desjardins of Lemken said there are multiple reasons it made sense for the companies to work together.
The two companies are mid-sized, family-owned German companies that have worked together in the past.
“There is no overlapping of the products, and we have all over the world some common dealers and importers partners. So, we regularly communicate and work with each other,” Desjardins said.
The tractor is cab-less with a diesel-electric drive powered by a Rolls Royce Power Systems MTU four-cylinder, 230 horsepower diesel engine, capable of producing up to 170 kilowatts of electricity. The engine is based on a Mercedes Benz design found in a wide variety of agricultural applications.
The frame, driveline and software have been designed for automated Krone and Lemken forage harvesting and tillage attachments.
The implements and the drive unit that Combined Powers calls an autonomous process unit, act as one integrated system.
Multiple sensors and artificial intelligence are used to detect obstacles and plan the machine’s path, and ISOBUS is used to communicate between the drive unit and the attached implement.
Desjardins said Combined Powers is an extension of the automation development already achieved at each company, and that both companies already have automated systems in their equipment line-ups.
Krones forage harvesters have an operator assist system that uses a photo-optical sensor in the middle of the corn header that measures the maturity of the plant and automatically adjusts the length of cut.
It also automatically matches the forward speed to the crop stand and yields.
Lemken is also adding sensors and collecting information from its tillage and planting platforms.
A cultivator Lemken developed for the Combined Powers system can detect tillage depth and if the cultivator is plugging with trash.
“One camera is to avoid the addition of too much accumulation of earth and vegetation trash, and one sensor is there to calculate the distance to the ground and to measure the working depth. Another camera is for checking soil crumbling,” Desjardins said.
“The cultivator is changing according to the contour of the field where you are working.”
He said Lemkin’s seed drills already send information to tractors through the ISOBUS connection, and that the importance of equipping implements with smart technology is constantly increasing.
When it comes to agricultural equipment, Desjardins said there are two major categories of automation.
The first focuses on control of the robot in terms of where it moves in the environment that has a large focus on the distance between it and objects and how to avoid them.
“On the other side you have the process control. We have some sensors and cameras, and they are more focused on the machine’s (work).”
Operators of the robotic platform will control and monitor it from a mobile device that will be used to assign jobs and receive reports via a communication module and a data exchange hub.
“If the machine detects an obstacle. It has a possibility to change the trajectory and to respect a certain distance to the obstacle,” Desjardins said.
He said the technology being developed at Combined Powers will help both Krone and Lemken improve the automation in the products it builds for use with a traditional tractor and operator setup.
Last year, Combined Powers used the robotic platform to cultivate, plow, sow, mow and rake.
Combined Powers has not said when or if the platform will be commercially available.
