Efficient Polling of Devices in CANopen Networks

n this paper a new technique is introduced that enables the communication efficiency of CANopen networks to be increased above its current limit. In particular, significant improvements can be achieved in all those cases where the application master needs to poll whole groups of input devices or process data have to be sampled at different rates. The new mechanism does not require any modification to the hardware of CAN controllers, but only slight changes to the CANopen protocol stack. Thus, it can be implemented easily and inexpensively by simply upgrading the firmware of the existing devices.