Heavy Equipment & Agriculture Technology

In an increasingly complex market, the agricultural sector is embracing software-defined technologies (autonomous tractors, drones, variable-rate technology) opening the doors to precision farming, data-driven decisions, and new agriculture technologies.

Similarly, in the quarrying and mining sectors, automated haulage systems (AHS) and remote-controlled drill systems reduce human exposure to hazardous mining environments, increasing productivity and efficiency.

However, complex software-defined technologies require long-term maintenance. You need to be able to update the software running on multi-system devices to ensure they operate as safely and reliably as possible. Here are some of the benefits of Codethink’s approach to long-term maintenance of multi-system devices specific to heavy equipment and agritech:

• Regular patches will protect against cyber-threats
• Ensure compliance with compliance/regulatory requirements
• Introduce new features and meet consumer demand (telematics, ADAS, VRT)
• Redundancy and fail-safes
• Reduce the likelihood of crashes/malfunctions

Our software delivery workflows transform the turnaround times between feature development and delivery. This ensures end users always have reliable access to the latest updates during critical periods.

At Codethink, a foundational service element is the handover of specific skills, allowing customers to build, test, and upgrade device firmware. This, along with open-source hardware and software, ensures that solutions evolve and remain reliable over long periods.

You can learn more about our approach to Long Term Maintainability here.

Codethink has a track record of delivering state-of-the-art software design and engineering.

As with our work in the automotive sector, we believe that heavy equipment and technology in agriculture—from excavators to haul trucks to cultivators—must be able to regularly update products with embedded software. Software integration must be maintained with robust rolling updates over the product's service lifetime to achieve this.

Ultimately, with increased pressure on the primary sector industries to comply with stricter compliance requirements, our approach to the long-term maintainability of software is crucial to the success of primary sector industries.

Our approach to software integration assists with the following:

• Rapid development of stable system images
• Emulation for shift-left testing (more on this below)
• Assuring real-time requirements
• Alleviating data-processing bottlenecks
• Robust fail-safe mechanisms for automated machinery
• Deploying AHS or machine learning modules
• Providing traceability for information management systems
• Assuring functional safety and compliance
• Support for over-the-air updates

Click here to read our customer case studies.

Effective integration relies heavily on testing and automation. Consequently, we have extensive experience in testing simulations built with emulation frameworks.

Hardware-free testing environments—generated via containerisation/virtualisation technologies—provide our existing clients with significant long-term benefits. Developer teams can spot problems earlier during the design process, making any changes to the integration process much more manageable.

Ben Dooks, Senior Software Engineer at Codethink, presented at LinuxCon, Japan, discussing the benefits of emulation tools (QEMU) to create testing environments to simulate modern systems.

• Customer case studies

Articles

• 'The challenges behind electric vehicle infrastructure'
• 'Long Term Maintainability'
• 'Adding RISC-V Vector Cryptography Extension support to QEMU'

You can also view the full range of our safety articles here.

If you would like to discuss Codethink's work with heavy machinery and agriculture technology, please get in touch via sales@codethink.co.uk.