• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.227-239
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• 2012

Recent advances in electronics have enabled various conventional products to incorporate with numerous powerful microcontroller. Generally, an embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system, often with real-time computing constraints. The growing performance and reliability of hardware components and the possibilities brought by various design method enabled implementing complex functions that improve the comport of the system's occupant as well as their safety. A cyber physical system (CPS) is a system featuring a tight combination of, and coordination between, the system's computational and physical elements. The concept of cyber physical system, including physical elements, cyber elements, and shared networks, has been introduced due to two general reasons: design flexibility and reliability. This paper presents a cyber physical system where system components are connected to a shared network, and control functions are divided into small tasks that are distributed over a number of embedded controllers with limited computing capacity. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of cyber physical system, an unmanned forklift with autonomous obstacle avoidance ability is implemented and its performance is experimentally evaluated.