CAN in steering and brak ing in-vehicle robots
Source: CAN Newsletter March 2011
Carmakers test their road vehicles intensively. This includes steering and baking tests. In order to achieve reproducible tests, it is necessary to use the same steering trajectories, for example. Human test drives could not to this with the same accuracy as automatic systems, especially if the car’s suspension has been changed between tests or if two different types of vehicles are being compared. This is why the automotive industry is in favor of steering and braking in-vehicle robots. Of course, those robots need optionally connection to the CAN-based in-vehicle networks or to CAN-based measurement and data logger systems. “These CAN signals may simply be recorded by the robot, or they may be used for triggering purposes,” explained Dr. Steave Neads by Anthony Best Dynamics (ABD), one of the market-leading manufacturers of in-vehicle robots. The trigger is used to start robot actions (e.g. steering) or for vehicle control (e.g. increasing or decreasing speed). The CAN input enables external controllers to send commands to the robot (this is used by some researcher, who want to develop their own control algorithms to drive the vehicle). “In the future, the CAN output form the robot may be used to send commands to the vehicle’s own control system,” said Neads. “But this is not a typical use at the present time.”
