A Modular and Scalable Simulation Framework for Agricultural Vehicles

In the automotive area we have in our days a number of simulation environments that reproduce the dynamical characteristics of a vehicle in a very realistic way. These environments cannot be easily used in other domains or applied on complex, coupled machines for example ride-lawn mowers, for several reasons. On one hand the heterogeneous vegetation that has to be processed by the engine is influencing the dynamic driving characteristics of the vehicle and on the other hand the off-road terrain with inclinations are not normed and make the modelling process more difficult. This paper presents a concept of a simulation environment, where the agricultural environment is modelled as well as the driving dynamic characteristics of machines with coupled engines. The framework has real time capabilities and so enables Hardware in the Loop prototyping. We show this by validating a mowing process, where we explicitly model a hybrid ride-on lawn mower and the mowing environment.