Design of a safety-critical drive-by-wire system using FlexCAN

This paper describes the design of a drive-by-wire system for a commercial lift truck using the FlexCAN communication architecture. FlexCAN is a recently developed architecture based on the CAN protocol to support deterministic and safety-critical applications. The main features of FlexCAN are its simplicity and ready implementation based on COTS CAN components. The main steer-by-wire design tasks are listed and a description of how each of the tasks was accomplished using the FlexCAN architecture is detailed. A performance evaluation of the design is included.