Voice-driven fleet management system for agricultural operations

Abstract

Food consumption is constantly increasing at global scale. In this light, agricultural production also needs to increase in order to satisfy the relevant demand for agricultural products. However, due to by environmental and biological factors (e.g. soil compaction) the weight and size of the machinery cannot be further physically optimized. Thus, only marginal improvements are possible to increase equipment effectiveness. On the contrary, late technological advances in ICT provide the ground for significant improvements in agri-production efficiency. In this work, the V-Agrifleet tool is presented and demonstrated. V-Agrifleet is developed to provide a “hands-free” interface for information exchange and an “Olympic view” to all coordinated users, giving them the ability for decentralized decision-making. The proposed tool can be used by the end-users (e.g. farmers, contractors, farm associations, agri-products storage and processing facilities, etc.) order to optimize task and time management. The visualized documentation of the fleet performance provides valuable information for the evaluation management level giving the opportunity for improvements in the planning of next operations. Its vendor-independent architecture, voice-driven interaction, context awareness functionalities and operation planning support constitute V-Agrifleet application a highly innovative agricultural machinery operational aiding system.