Achievement of Plug and Play Connection of Sensors with Multiple Different I/Fs to Automotive Network

Abstract

An automobile is equipped with many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to which various sensors are connected, and advanced control is achieved by exchanging information among the ECUs through automotive networks. However, it is difficult for beginners just like students to implement such networks on short development schedule, because costs for designing, constructing, testing and managing the networks are a burden to them with an increase of connected nodes. For this problem, we have proposed a framework of plug and play connection in which sensor nodes are automatically connected to automotive network. In this paper, we propose a multichannel switcher, a sensor I/F judgement algorithm and a GUI environment for setting sensor-specific information to put the framework to practical use.