Method of Differential-Based Remote Upgrade for ECUs on Vehicles*

Abstract

In view of the problem that the current update flashing of the traditional automotive electronic control unit (ECU) software highly relies on professional maintenance personnel and external equipment, a method for ECU remote data flashing is proposed to achieve remote and efficient upgrade of ECU software. Furthermore, through the introduction of backup partitions and differential upgrade methods, the problems of lack of fault-tolerant processing, high bandwidth requirements and low efficiency in traditional ECU software update flashing are also solved. In this article, a remote update system is built, including the server-side and the vehicle, and the interface and communication protocols are defined based on HTTPS. The above methods have been verified on NXP IMX 6 platform. Associated testing of the simulation of the ECU by the STM32 and ROCKCHIP demo board has been made based on the CAN and Ethernet simulating the vehicle network architecture. By the real data catching from Ethernet and the CAN, the details of the log file of the programs’ event tracking information are analyzed to obtain the experimental results. The results indicated that the incremental remote data updating system built in this article can remotely update the CAN software accurately and efficiently in all simulation tests, which proved the practicability, accuracy, and efficiency of this method.