Decentralized control through high-speed optical bus communication in terrestrial/air vehicles

This article submits an architecture for supporting decentralized control. The focus is on optical bus as a solution to overcome the main disadvantages of decentralized control. Even though decentralized control is mediated as being a better solution than centralized one, we continue to find centralized control in practice. One reason is the bottleneck introduced by the field bus communication between decentralized nodes. Fiber optics bus is often associated to expensive infrastructure. Its main applications are due to its high data throughput and only in special cases due to the resistance against EMI. The article discusses the applications where optical buses exist as de facto implementation and other applications where it should exist but are rarely implemented. In the end, a versatile embedded architecture for a decentralized control is proposed which is designed to overcome all of discussed issues. The novelty consists in how the node is organized to quickly adopt different configuration.