Piling, drilling and compacting vehicles
Source: CAN Newsletter March 2005
Horst Landwehr and Marco Heinbüche (Wika)
A company that has used the standardized CANopen bus system to their advantage is ABI, a manufacturer of specialist construction machinery. Located at Niedernberg and in San Francisco, USA, ABI has become one of the market leaders in the civil engineering machinery sector. They offer a range of machines, tools and accessories for piling, drilling and compacting applications. To date, they have built more than 1 000 machines in various sizes and also for custom-applications.
In modern construction machinery networked sensors replace analog sensors. Within CANopen networks on such machines, you will find angle encoders, inclination sensors and I/O modules and also CANopen pressure sensors, used for valve control feedback. These sensors measure, record and control working pressures during the piling or drilling process. The requirement to log such data during construction work is vital to prove that the values recorded comply with threshold values in respect of close-by communities. This is true especially in cases of possible damage to local buildings. The data-logging requirements for each project are laid down and specified within the bid invitations.
