Vehicle Fleet Tracking

Within the Connected Sensor Intelligence project at the HEF, application examples will be established which demonstrate the suitability and potential of the developed sensor data infrastructure. Together with the fleet vehicle management, a use case was developed in which vehicles of the research stations are equipped with an intelligent GPS tracker device that reacts on vehicle movements and accordingly sends the last position of the vehicle at flexible rate.

For this purpose, the Single Depth Soil Sensor was purchased from Sensoterra, which proved to be suitable due to its reliability, robustness and energy saving. For communication, a LoRaWAN module was embedded, so that the devices can be connected via a public network such as Everynet or The Things Network. The sensor device measures soil moisture in a depth of 15 centimeter.

One of the main problems that many sensor devices have is the need to constantly charge the battery by manually connecting them to charging stations. The device is designed for energy efficency: the device goes into sleep once it's not in use and by that saves energy of the integrated LiPo battery. By that the device can run for up to three years.