Conveyor Belt Speed Control Through CAN BUS in CoppeliaSim using Arduino Mega2560

Abstract

Purpose: CAN Bus is a robust way to communicate inter-device Communication. Primarily it is used in the vehicle. But now, it is also used in various industrial automation fields. Among different branded robots, they use CAN-bus to control the robot movement. When the new researchers integrate the can bus into their project, they need to spend time running and handling the device through the CAN bus. This research work is basically for those trying to integrate the CAN bus into their project in a short period. Here, we briefly describe the CAN bus protocol first, then go through a practical experiment to better understand it. In our experiment, we feed the Analog value as a speed profile through the CAN bus to the CoppeliaSim virtual environment to see the speed variation of the simulated conveyor belt upon rotating the potentiometer. The complete project code and demo video are available on Github. The interested researcher can download and experiment on it.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This research work demonstrates how to exchange data through CAN bus between a virtual and a natural environment. We created a virtual environment using the CoppeliasSim robot simulator. Inside the simulator, we add a conveyor belt. Using c#, we created a bridge application that translates the data between the simulator and the natural environment outside it. We used two Arduino Mega 2560 boards and two MCP2515 based TJA1050 popular CAN driver modules. The CoppeliaSim requests data to the remote master through the bridge application and CAN bus. The remote master reads the analog value and sends it back to the simulator through the local master. CoppeliaSim changes its conveyor belt speed by parsing the data and converting it to the speed value.

Findings/Result: We can find some concepts and procedures to control the virtual elements from the external world through the CAN bus. We can convert any environmental analog parameter into digital form and display it locally or remotely inside the simulator. We can build the digital twins used to process monitoring in the industrial automation field following this experiment.

Originality/Value: Most CAN bus-related documents lack a practical approach or an accumulation of workable summaries. We demonstrate the CAN bus differently in this research work. This paper is an entirely practical-oriented demonstration. This is the unique approach to controlling the virtual element from the real world through the CAN bus. The new researcher can get helpful references to integrate the CAN bus into their project.