Safety is a critical factor in the UAV and autonomous vehicle industry, especially when focusing on a UAV Certification process. Traditional expanding boards are commonly used to add inputs and/or outputs to an existing system. This allows a system to control more elements than it initially is able to, enhancing the system possibilities.

Veronte CAN Expander boards

Veronte CAN Expander is an expansion board developed with a redundant system in mind. It allows controlling its outputs based on commands it receives via CAN. It is a powerful peripheral very useful to reduce the amount of cable in autonomous vehicles at the time that reduces the risks of interferences and permits to increase the number of devices in the system.

CAN Expander in redundant systems

CAN Expander board allows a dual, redundant, CAN data channel connection to a redundant system with just four wires. It accepts commands from both CAN channels to control its outputs and, additionally, it processes the arbitration data frames which are intended to inform about the status of the redundant system.

In tandem with a Veronte Autopilot 4x redundant system, every CAN Expander board will read the internal status sent by Veronte  Autopilot 4x and make use of that information to output the appropriate data, which is related to the autopilot playing the master role in it.

Each CAN Expander board can be configured to do an actual arbitration based on the data received from simple elements within the Veronte Autopilot 4x, which provides an extra safety feature in case of malfunction of the Veronte Autopilot 4x arbiter board.

Benefits of using CAN Expander in redundant systems

The main benefits of using CAN Expander in the redundant system are:

• CAN bus is used as a transmission medium, which is a robust industrial bus with data integrity built-in.
• Dual data communication channels between master and each CAN Expander board provides a redundant data channel for each of them.
• Complex systems wiring simplification as just 4 wires are needed to build two CAN bus rings.
• High data bandwidth, up to 1Mbps on each CAN bus.
• Low control latency: less than 1ms.
• Veronte Autopilot 4x symbiosis allows working using the data generated from a 4xVeronte system to output the proper values from the redundant inputs.