Battery Management System for Unmanned Electric Vehicles with CAN BUS and Internet of Things

In recent decades, the trend of using zero-emission vehicles has been constantly evolving. This trend brings about not only the pressure to develop electric vehicles (EVs) or hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) but also the demand for further developments in battery technologies and safe use of battery systems. Concerning the safe usage of battery systems, Battery Management Systems (BMS) play one of the most important roles. A BMS is used to monitor operating temperature and State of Charge (SoC), as well as protect the battery system against cell imbalance. The paper aims to present hardware and software designs of a BMS for unmanned EVs, which use Lithium multi-cell battery packs. For higher modularity, the designed BMS uses a distributed topology and contains a master module with more slave modules. Each slave module is in charge of monitoring and protecting a multi-cell battery pack. All information about the state of each battery pack is sent to the master module which saves and sends all data to the control station if required. Controlled Area Network (CAN) bus and Internet of Things technologies are designed for requirements from different applications for communications between slave modules and the master module, and between the master module and control station.