scholarly journals Time-Synchronization Method for CAN–Ethernet Networks with Gateways

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (24) ◽  
pp. 8873
Author(s):  
Hyeong Jun Kim ◽  
Uri Lee ◽  
Manho Kim ◽  
Suk Lee

Time-synchronization technology can provide a common notion of time among the participating nodes on a network. This is essential not only for protocol operation for time-critical services but also for the time stamp for information included in the message. Precise time information can be very crucial for such things as autonomous driving because there are various sensor measurements from multiple cameras, and radio detection and ranging (radar) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) are used for perceiving the current situation via sensor fusion. A well-known synchronization method, IEEE 1588, denoted as the precision time protocol (PTP), can be used for various applications. For in-vehicle networks of autonomous cars, we have to consider that the network may be comprised of subnetworks based on different protocols such as controller area network (CAN) and Ethernet. However, implementing PTPs on such heterogeneous vehicle networks causes several problems. First, the PTP procedure must be modified to be implement on a CAN network. Second, to calculate the delay and offset for PTP, the processing delay that occurs during message conversion must be considered. In this paper, we propose a synchronization method for CAN–Ethernet networks to solve these problems. The performance of the proposed synchronization method is evaluated by experiments on a real CAN–Ethernet network.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Paul Milbredt ◽  
Efim Schick ◽  
Michael Hübner

Modern automotive control applications require a holistic time-sensitive development. Nowadays, this is achieved by technologies specifically designed for the automotive domain, like FlexRay, which offer a fault-tolerant time synchronization mechanism built into the protocol. Currently, the automotive industry adopts the Ethernet within the car, not only for embedding consumer electronics, but also as a fast and reliable backbone for control applications. Still, low-cost but highly reliable sensors connected over the traditional Controller Area Network (CAN) deliver data needed for autonomous driving. To fusion the data efficiently among all, a common timebase is required. The alternative would be oversampling, which uses more time and energy, e.g., at least double the perception rates of sensors. Ethernet and CAN do require the latter by default. Hence, a global synchronization mechanism eases tremendously the design of a low power automotive network and is the foundation of a transparent global clock. In this article, we present the first step: Synchronizing legacy FlexRay networks to the upcoming Ethernet backbone, which will contain a precise clock over the generalized Precision Time Protocol (gPTP) defined in IEEE 802.1AS. FlexRay then could still drive its strengths with deterministic transmission behavior and possibly also serve as a redundant technology for fail-operational system design.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 4319
Author(s):  
Jiawang Chen ◽  
Chen Cao ◽  
Yongqiang Ge ◽  
Huangchao Zhu ◽  
Chunying Xu ◽  
...  

The data synchronous acquisition is crucial to the seafloor subsidence monitoring system for gas hydrate mining areas based on microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS). Because the independent and high-precision time reference sources on land cannot be used on the seafloor, especially in the deep sea, a relative time synchronization method based on input/output (I/O) and controller area network (CAN) bus was proposed to realize the internal time synchronization of the system. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, tests including the deformation test of the MEMS sensor array under high pressure, synchronous accuracy test, and landslide and collapse simulation tests were carried out. The synchronization method was performed once every 24 h, and the time drift was reduced to 0.38 ms from more than 30 ms, demonstrating that method can achieve consistent internal time of the system. The method does not require additional hardware devices and has adjustable accuracy.


Author(s):  
Wulf Loh ◽  
Janina Loh

In this chapter, we give a brief overview of the traditional notion of responsibility and introduce a concept of distributed responsibility within a responsibility network of engineers, driver, and autonomous driving system. In order to evaluate this concept, we explore the notion of man–machine hybrid systems with regard to self-driving cars and conclude that the unit comprising the car and the operator/driver consists of such a hybrid system that can assume a shared responsibility different from the responsibility of other actors in the responsibility network. Discussing certain moral dilemma situations that are structured much like trolley cases, we deduce that as long as there is something like a driver in autonomous cars as part of the hybrid system, she will have to bear the responsibility for making the morally relevant decisions that are not covered by traffic rules.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 420
Author(s):  
Stefano Quer ◽  
Luz Garcia

Research on autonomous cars has become one of the main research paths in the automotive industry, with many critical issues that remain to be explored while considering the overall methodology and its practical applicability. In this paper, we present an industrial experience in which we build a complete autonomous driving system, from the sensor units to the car control equipment, and we describe its adoption and testing phase on the field. We report how we organize data fusion and map manipulation to represent the required reality. We focus on the communication and synchronization issues between the data-fusion device and the path-planner, between the CPU and the GPU units, and among different CUDA kernels implementing the core local planner module. In these frameworks, we propose simple representation strategies and approximation techniques which guarantee almost no penalty in terms of accuracy and large savings in terms of memory occupation and memory transfer times. We show how we adopt a recent implementation on parallel many-core devices, such as CUDA-based GPGPU, to reduce the computational burden of rapidly exploring random trees to explore the state space along with a given reference path. We report on our use of the controller and the vehicle simulator. We run experiments on several real scenarios, and we report the paths generated with the different settings, with their relative errors and computation times. We prove that our approach can generate reasonable paths on a multitude of standard maneuvers in real time.


Author(s):  
Young Soo Do ◽  
Min Ho Kim ◽  
Jae Wook Jeon

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document