2010 2nd International Conference on Industrial Mechatronics and Automation

Design of CAN Bus Application Layer Protocol for

Aerocraft Control System

Hongwei Zhang, Hongguang Jia, Yue Zhang Wenjuan Zhang

Changchun institute of optics, fine mechanics and physics, Department of Physics
Chinese Academy of Sciences Northeast Normal University
Changchun, Jilin Changchun, Jilin
E-mail: Zhanghw135@163.com E-mail: Zhangwj979@163.com

Abstract-A special Controller Area Network (CAN) bus CAN bus specification which ensure correct data transmission
application layer protocol is designed for the highly reliable among nodes on the bus [4], [5]. However, in addition to the
communication of microcomputer-based systems in aerocraft basic two services, supports of more services are needed in
control system by analyzing the practical time sequence of data actual multi-node data communication application situation,
transmission, data priority, data type and data function etc in which can be defmed in an application protocol.
this paper. Identifier distribution, data storage form, data type,
data exchange method and fault handling mechanism of the The application protocol can be self-defined or choose a
application layer protocol are specified in detail in the standard protocol of international organizations such as
background of a real aerocraft control system. At last a CANopen or CANaerospace. Considering the complex
simulation platform based on CAN bus for aerocraft control structure of international standard protocol, the special working
system is built to validate the design. Experimental results show environment and the security of aerocraft, a self-designed
that this application layer protocol meets the requirements of application layer protocol is chosen in this paper.
data transmission reliability, real-time and high efficiency. The
bus load rate is low and there is great room for expansion. II. AEROCRAFT CONTROL SYSTEM VIA CAN
Taken a real aerocraft control system based on CAN bus as
Index Terms-C AN Bus, Application Layer Protocol,
Aerocraft Control System, Identifier, priority, Fault Handling
an example, the internal structure is shown in Fig. 1. The CAN
bus network consists of a ground test node and 12 subsystem
I. INTRODUCTION nodes which are connected together by shielded twisted pair.
When the bus is idle, any connected node may start to transmit
The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus originated in the
a message, and then the other nodes are able to decide whether
20th century early 80s. which is widely applied in automotive the data are to be acted upon or not by message filtering.
and industrial fields [1], [2], becomes a focus in aerocraft field
depending on high reliability, hard real-time, high bus The bus topology of the CAN network should be adopt, the
utilization ratio and simple hardware connection mechanism length of branch line should be less than 30cm and the distance
etc [3]. between two adjacent nodes should be more than 10cm in the
practical networking process, which may reduce the branch
Only data link layer and physical layer are defined in the signal reflection. Two 120n resistances are needed on the
Airborne Inertia l Navigation Yaw Yaw Aileron Aileron
Computer Computer At
c ua tor 2 c ua tor 4
At At
c ua tor 2 At
c ua tor 4
PC/104 DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP281 2
System System System System System System
CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN

CAN Bu s I I I I I I CANH
� Rl R2

I I I I I I I
CANL

CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN

DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP2812 DSP2812
Computer
System System System System System System
Data Pltchmg Pltchmg Aileron Aileron Grou nd Test
Seeker
Rec order Actuator 1 Ac tua tor 3 Actuator 1 Actuator 3 System
Figure 1. The internal structure of the aerocraft control system.

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978-1-4244-7656-5/10/$26.00 mOlO IEEE ICIMA2010
 TABLEr. MESSAGE IDENTIFIER ALLOCATION SCHEME TABLE III. TARGET NODE DEFINITION

1024 1024
Distributiou 10 Meanings Target Node Target Node
-1020 -1020

lO28 to lO25 Message Type 00000 All Nodes 1000 1 Yaw Actuator 4
lO24 to lO20 Target Node 00 100 Aerocraft computer 100 1 1 Aileron Actuator I
lOI9 to lO 13 Message Function 00 1 1 1 Inertial Navigation Computer 10 100 Aileron Actuator 2
lOI2 to lOlO Frame Type 0 1000 Seeker 10 10 1 Aileron Actuator 3
lO9 to lOO Reserved 0 1 1 10 Pitching Actuator I 10 1 10 Aileron Actuator 4
RTR Remote Frame 01111 Pitching Actuator 3 1 100 1 Data Recorder
DO to D7 Data Field 10000 Yaw Actuator 2 1 1 1 10 Ground Test System

terminal of the bus which can reduce the signal refection and
increase anti-interference ability and reliability.
Data transmission among the subsystems of the aerocraft
control system may be monitored easily by adopting CAN bus
technology. All the data transmitted on the bus will be stored
only by a data recorder which can provide experimental data
for the post-processing and a basis to fmd the causes of fault in
future. It is also beneficial to test and analyze the current state
of the aerocraft control system on the ground. The ground test
node is connected to the CAN bus network simply by a CAN
repeater which is used for extending the distance of CAN
communication, and then all the subsystems of the aerocraft
can be remotely tested [6].
III. THE DESIGN OF ApPLICATION LAYER PROTOCOL
CAN bus can be divided into physical layer and data link
layer according to the ISO reference standard model for open
systems interconnection (OSI). But only basic two services in
practical application are not enough, such as, sending more
than eight bytes data block and establishing a key message
response mechanism. Therefore, an application layer protocol
is needed to support other services. A self-made CAN bus
application layer protocol for aerocraft control system is
designed in this paper for the special requirements of
confidentiality and pertinence. Due to fixed-priority scheduling
algorithm adopted in data transmission of CAN bus, the signal
transmission is unpredictable. A reasonable application layer
protocol must ensure the correct time sequence of data
transmission and a short waiting delay time for each message.
Identifier distribution, data storage form, data type, data
exchange method and fault handling mechanism are introduced
in the application layer protocol [7].
A. Message identifier distribution
The CAN message identifier is used to define the meanings
and priority of data. Establishing a reasonable and efficient
identifier distribution scheme is a precondition to make full use
of the bus performance and efficiency.
According to the bit arbitration mechanism of CAN bus, it
is known that the smaller value of the message identifier the
higher priority it has. Extended frame format containing 29-bit
identifier is adopted in this protocol. The allocation scheme of
the message identifier is shown in Table I:
Four bits of the identifier from ID28 to ID25 are used to
defme the message type. The defmition is shown in Table II:
As shown in Table II, Broadcast command frame is
accepted by all nodes and command frame is accepted by one
node. Acknowledgment of command Frame is the response of
the receiving node which accepts the command frame. Notice
frame is used to transmit data and remote frame is used to
request another node to send the relevant data. Test command
frame is transmitted to one node with a test instruction and
acknowledgment of test command frame is the response. Start
notice frame is sent by the node which has started completely.
The priority of the broadcast command frame is the highest
and the start notice frame is the lowest in this protocol.
Five bits of the identifier from ID24 to ID20 are used to
define target node that shows the aim to which the message is
sent. According to different priorities of the subsystems, the
detailed defmition of target node for aerocraft control system is
shown in Table III:
Seven bits of the identifier from ID19 to ID13 are used to
defme the specific functions of the message frame.
It is known that eight bytes data may be sent at most in one
message frame on CAN bus. But for more than eight bytes data
block, a multi-frame transmission mode is designed in this
protocol. Three bits from ID12 to IDlO are used to define
frame type which is shown in Table IV. By encoding these
three bits, a single frame mode or multi-frame mode may be
chosen.

TABLE II. MESSAGE TYPE DEFINITION TABLE IV. FRAME TYPE DEFINITION

1028-1025 Message Type 1012-1010 Explanations

0000 Broadcast Command Frame 000 Single frame

00 1 1 Command Frame 00 1 The First frame of the data block
0 100 Acknowledgment Of Command Frame 0 10 The Second frame of the data block
1000 Notice Frame or Remote Frame 011 The Third frame o f the data block
1 100 Test Command Frame 100 The Fourth frame of the data block
1 10 1 Acknowledgment Of Test Command Frame 10 1 The Fifth frame of the data block
1111 Start Notice Frame 1 10 The Sixth frame of the data block
III The End frame of the data block

165

TABLE V. DATA ENCODING FORMAT DEFINITION
I�I�I� I I I
D D D D
Data Field
0 4 5 6
Float Data (4 byte s ) N one
Intege r Data (4l>yte s ) N one
Data Type
Dou ble Data (8 byte s )
And Location
I
Byte Data N one
(l byte)
B. Data storage form and data type definition
CAN bus is a multi-master network. When the bus is free,
any node can send a message and other nodes may accept the
correlative message depending on the message filtering
mechanism. In order to ensure data decoding correctly by all
nodes, an uniform format of data encoding should be adopted.
According to various data types used in the aerocraft
control system, the data encoding format are defmed in
Table V:
C. Data Exchange Methods
In order to ensure the accuracy and high efficiency of data
transmission, the following three data exchange methods are
used in the protocol:
I) Production / consumption mode
A producer that is sending data node and one or more
consumers that are receiving data nodes are included in this
mode. It is the default mode of CAN bus that a message is sent
to CAN bus by a node and all the other nodes decide to accept
or not by message filtering mechanism.
2) Remote request mode (master/slave mode)
Remote frame is supported in this protocol for master/slave
actions. The slave node responses a message frame containing
remote request data with the same ID of the remote request
frame which is sent by a master node. This mode is mainly
used for information acquisition. For example, aerocraft
computer sends a remote frame to request information from
inertial navigation computer which returns aerocraft flight state
information.
3) Point-to-point communication mode
The data field of a single message on CAN bus only
contains up to 8 bytes data. The point-to-point communication
mode is used to transmit more than 8 bytes data block. In the
protocol, a special identifier segment from 1012 to 1010 is
provided for point-to-point communication, which marks the
data transmission working in a single frame mode or multi­
frame mode. The frame number is obtained by decoding the 10
segment in the point-to-point communication mode [8], [9].
D. Fault handling mechanism
Aerocraft control system has the following features that are
short working time, high real-time communication and large
data transmission etc. A fast fault handling mechanism is
needed to ensure the normal operation of the aerocraft control
system. The rules in the protocol are specified as follow:
I) Three times sending mechanism is adopted in the
protocol for the sending node. Any message which is sent
unsuccessfully may be retransmitted automatically twice
at most so that the other lower priority message frames are
D able to be transmitted with short delay time.
7
2) Key frame time monitoring mechanism is defined for the
receiving node. Key frame is a message containing
important data which are directly related to aerocraft
working process. For example, an actuator deflexion
command frame is sent by aercraft computer to aileron
actuator at each system control period during the flight
process of the aerocraft. The timer of aileron actuator
system, which is restarted after receiving an
acknowledgement frame sent by aerocraft computer, is set
to two system control periods. The aileron actuator
maintains the current status if not receiving the command
frame after two system control periods. When the
deflexion command frame is received again, it switches
into the normal instruction tracing mode.
IV. EXPERIMENTS
To validate the correctness of the application layer protocol,
a simulation platform for aerocraft control system via CAN bus
is built.
The platform mainly consists of three DSP2812
experimental boards which simulate inertial navigation
computer, seeker and data recorder respectively, a PC/104
embedded system which simulates aerocraft computer, eight
DSP2812 experiment boards and eight actuator mechanical
models which simulate four aileron actuators, two Pitching
Actuators and two jaw actuators, a CANOE software platform
which is used to record and analyze the transmission message
on bus and a special CAN bus cable which is produced by
LAPP GROUP in Germany. Bus baud rate in the experiment is
IMbps and the control period of the aerocraft control system is
IOms.
In a single control period, Firstly, aerocraft computer sends
a remote frame to inertial navigation computer which feeds
back six message frames containing aerocraft state information
data. Secondly, aerocraft computer sends a remote frame to
Seeker which responses six message frames containing seeker
state information data. Thirdly, aerocraft computer sends a
broadcast actuator deflexion command frame containing a float
actuator deflexion angle data to four aileron actuators, and then
every aileron actuator sends an acknowledgment frame
containing a float actual actuator deflexion angle data. Finally,
the aerocraft computer sends a broadcast actuator deflexion
command frame containing a float actuator deflexion angle
data to two yaw actuators and a float actuator deflexion angle
data to two pitching actuators, and then four message frames
which contain the actual actuator deflexion angle are sent by
two yaw actuators and two pitching actuators. All the message
frames transmitted on CAN bus are saved by the data recorder.
This experiment runs five minutes, the final experimental
results are shown in Table VI provided by CANoe software,
and the contrast curve between the command actuator deflexion
angle and the actual actuator deflexion angle of Aileron
Actuator I (AAI) is shown in Fig. 2:
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 TABLE VI. STATISTICS OF THE Bus

Inertial Navigation Single Aileron Single Front

Subsystem Name Aerocraft computer Seeker Data Recorder
Computer Actuator System Actuator System

Send Frame 120000 180000 180000 30000 30000 0

Receive Frame 600000 30000 30000 30000 30000 720000

Command Anr;le Of HI [Der;] Actual Antle Of AAI [De!d

built to validate the design. The experimental results indicate
that it is practically feasible to this application layer protocol
which meets the requirements of data transmission reliability,
1.0
real-time and high efficiency, etc. The research in aerocraft
control system has a referenced significance to the engineering
practice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
o.0 .--�
All the authors would like to thank the sponsors and the
colleagues who give us good suggestions and helps during the
-0. 5
experiment.

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