Design and Implementation of FlexRay Network for an Autonomous Vehicle

Abstract

Autonomous vehicle uses a lot of information from various sensors not only to perceive environment but also to control the vehicle. For efficient sharing of the information, distributed embedded system based on in-vehicle network(IVN) is essential part of the autonomous vehicle. Controller Area Network(CAN) is the most widely used IVN protocol because of its low cost and robustness. However, CAN has limitations such as low bandwidth and lack of determinism. In order to overcome the limitation of CAN, FlexRay network protocol which is deterministic, fast and fault-tolerant was proposed. In this paper, a FlexRay network protocol is applied to a network based autonomous vehicle. After applying the FlexRay network, the information is transmitted through the network every 10 millisecond by using 73.93% of static slots without network delay.