Vehicle Applications of Controller Area Network

Abstract

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is a serial bus communications protocol developed by Bosch in the early 1980s. It defines a standard for efficient and reliable communication between sensor, actuator, controller, and other nodes in real-time applications. CAN is the de facto standard in a large variety of networked embedded control systems. The early CAN development was mainly supported by the vehicle industry: CAN is found in a variety of passenger cars, trucks, boats, spacecraft, and other types of vehicles. The protocol is also widely used today in industrial automation and other areas of networked embedded control, with applications in diverse products such as production machinery, medical equipment, building automation, weaving machines, and wheelchairs. The purpose of this chapter is to give an introduction to CAN and some of its vehicle applications. The outline is as follows. Section 2 describes the CAN protocol, including its message formats and error handling. The section is concluded by a brief history of CAN. Examples of vehicle application architectures based on CAN are given in Section 3. A few specific control loops closed over CAN buses are discussed in Section 4. The paper is concluded with some perspectives in Section 5, where current research issues such as x-by-wire and standardized software architectures are considered. The examples are described in more detail in [14]. A detailed description of CAN is given in the textbook [6]. Another good resource for further information is the homepage of the organization CAN-in-Automation (CiA) [3]. The use of CAN as a basis for distributed control systems is discussed in [13].