ABSTRACT
The evolution and development of agricultural eld machinery has been shaped by technological development in other sectors of the world’s economy (e.g., defense and transportation). For example, without defense-related concerns over locating troop movements or guiding ordinates, it is doubtful that the civilian sector alone would have provided enough justication for space-based radio navigation or Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Similarly, the transportation sector has contributed signicantly to the deployment of microcontrollers in the off-road equipment sectors. Perhaps the single greatest factor in the automation of agricultural eld machinery has been the deployment of microcontrollers in controller area networks (CAN), thereby enabling integrated control of multiple machine functions.
