Integrated wiring system for construction equipment

This paper presents the development of an integrated wiring system that can support hierarchical control system for autonomous excavators. Lots of sensor signals and control signals are sent from actuators to the controller and vice versa in an autonomous excavator, which may deteriorate the reliability and stability of the system. To overcome this problem, a control system is divided into several a local controllers located at the actuators and the essential data are communicated among the controllers through the wiring systems under the supervision of a host controller. The wiring system is based on a time-division multiplexing technique and is able to connect various components that are distributed over the vehicle. This paper describes the conceptual design, packet definition, computer simulation, hardware architecture, and software for the integrated wiring system.