CAN Bus is a small-scale networking standard, originally designed for cars and, yes, busses, but is now used for many robotics or sensor networks that need better range and addressing than I2C, and don’t have the pins or computational ability to talk on Ethernet. CAN is 2 wire differential, which means it’s good for long distances and noisy environments.
Messages are sent at about 1Mbps rate – you set the frequency for the bus and then all ‘joiners’ must match it, and have an address before the packet so that each node can listen in to messages just for it. New nodes can be attached easily because they just need to connect to the two data lines anywhere in the shared net. Each CAN devices sends messages whenever it wants, and thanks to some clever data encoding, can detect if there’s a message collision and retransmit later.
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