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Can-Based Distributed Control For Autonomous Vehicles, Matthew J. Darr, Timothy S. Stombaugh, Scott A. Shearer, John P. Fulton

Matthew J. Darr

Through the work of researchers and the development of commercially available products, automated guidance has become a viable option for agricultural producers. One limiting factor of many commercially available technologies is that they only automate one function of an agricultural vehicle and that their control systems are proprietary to a single machine model.The objective of this project was to evaluate a controller area network (CAN bus) as the basis of an automated agricultural vehicle. The prototype system utilized several microcontroller-driven nodes to act as control points along a system wide CAN bus. Messages were transferred to the steering, transmission, and …