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Losses reduction and oil flow optimization management in construction machines and, in general, in heavy duty vehicles are two of the most challenging missions of today fluid power research. One of the most promising ideas is to implement multiple hydraulic power sources but this requires a flexible pump switch system; in fact, depending on flow request and machine mode, one or more pumps can be switched to serve each actuator. To put into practice these concepts it is necessary to in-depth design the distribution system, through which hydrostatic transmissions supply the different loads. The new component here presented realizes the pump switch management, creating a matrix framework of the hydraulic flow connections. Putting this concept it into practice the new architecture is able to connect alternatively a pump to one actuator at a time providing also for cross connections, enabling different sources flow summation.

Alongside with the increasing vehicle complexity, the functionalities related to the safety, diagnosis and maintainability have become critical. The operators of special machines such as agricultural, mining, construction vehicles might be overwhelmed by this increased complexity and, as a result, operations for the recovery or maintenance of their vehicles become difficult. The Augmented Reality (AR) seems to be a very promising technology both if applied to traditional smart-phones or to the upcoming glasses, that has been just presented to the market by several manufacturers. This paper reviews some use cases of applications created in Institute for Agricultural and Earthmoving Machines (IMAMOTER) of the National research Council of Italy (CNR) engineers laboratories, which propose a novel approach for assisted maintenance, recovery or training.

Ethernet is by now the most adopted bus for fast digital communications in many environments, from household entertainment, to PLC robotics in industrial assembly lines. Even in avionic applications, new standards are fixing research results. In a similar way in automotive industry, the interest in this technology is increasingly growing, pushed forward by much research and basically by the need of high throughput, that high dynamics distributed control requests. In the world of heavy-duty machines various needs suggest to investigate for a possible Ethernet Network implementation for both real time control and services. On the other hand Bosch proposes the FlexCAN, CAN Flexible rate, but it seems a short term solution for today's congested networks.