Abstract:In order to realize the autonomous navigation collaboration of multiple agricultural machinery in farmland environment, the multi-machine cooperative navigation communication system was designed and developed based on TD-LTE network in this paper. The system consists of four parts: navigation positioning sensors, wireless communication module, vehicle control terminal and remote communication software. The navigation positioning sensors include the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver, the inertial measurement unit (IMU), and the angle sensor, which are used to obtain the geographical position of each agricultural machinery, and their attitude and vehicle steering angle information. The wireless communication module uses 4G Data transfer unit (DTU) as the system communication equipment, which connects to the serial port of vehicle terminal, and realizes RS232 serial port conversion to TD-LTE network. After the serial port parameters and other information of 4G DTU was configured by configuration software, it connected the destination server IP address and port number. Then the sensor data collected from vehicle were transferred to the remote server communication software through the TD-LTE network, using the designed communication protocol. The vehicle control terminal is an industrial personal computer (IPC), which is used to achieve automatic control of agricultural machinery and human-computer interaction. Through applying the socket network programming, the data receiving display and data transmission function module was developed. The system is able to upload the status information of each agricultural machine in real time, and also receive the remote server control commands. The communication can be selective and the online agricultural machine have higher priority. Four Levuo tractors were used as the experimental platform, and the frequency of communication was 5Hz. The testing results showed that the packet loss rate is 0.1%, and there is no delay. Therefore, the system has a high reliability and real-time performance.