Application of controller area network to mobile robots

Abstract

A mobile robot hardware architecture generally consists of a number of sensors and actuators connected to a central processing unit. This type of architecture is time consuming and leads to an unreliable system. The purpose of this paper is to present a decentralized architecture made possible by recent advances in electronics. This architecture is based on the controller area network (CAN) bus and is shown to be very suitable and advantageous in mobile robotics.