CANopen Network for μcontroller-based Real Time Distributed Control Systems

This paper describes the design (hardware and software) and implementation of a modular communication system based on CAN network. The motivation of the work is related to the real-time distributed control systems field. The goal is to own the complete control of the communication stack when building embedded distributed prototypes. This would allow managing those communication issues that affect real time performance (i.e. computation of worst case execution times and priority assignment to tasks and messages). This CAN implementation (rtfCANopen) is modular, inexpensive, auto-downloadable and self-configurable. A case study, consisting in an autonomous mobile robot that uses rtfCANopen, is described. This prototype is designed and analysed using the Real-Time Framework developed by authors. This framework consists of a set of tools for developing real-time distributed systems and it covers all the phases: specification, analysis, simulation and code generation of distributed applications.