A CAN-based design for the control of electric vehicle

Due to the development of the advanced technologies, in the recent years, electronic devices for the communication and computer engineering have been considered to implement the so-called “X-by-Wire” scheme for steering control and braking control of the vehicles. It is known that the weight reduction of vehicle systems can decrease the power consumption when the traditional mechanical components can be replaced by electronic devices. Thus, X-by-wire system will be a trend in the automotive industry for saving energy. An event trigger design for vehicle control is proposed in this paper for vehicle control by using the protocol of Controller Area Network (CAN). The proposed design covers the development of CAN communication node, which is developed by using microprocessor chip Microchip PIC18F4585 and MCP2551 CAN transceiver. In addition, an interactive GUI-based utility program developer is also built up for user to easily develop the required function call to cope with the design specification. A wireless electric-driven control vehicle is served as a platform to verify the design of drive-by-wire and brake-by-wire operations. Experimental results demonstrate the success of the proposed design.