[kamocat]

The CAN standard has been designed to be resistant to noise and message corruption, both on a hardware and protocol level.
RS232 has not.

Thus, while you can wire your CAN bus just about anywhere around the robot, you have to be more careful with your initial wire from the the cRIO to the bridging Black Jaguar.
Several teams have reported problems from running this initial cable next to motors.

Rather than wiring it up and hoping it works, I'd like some more protection. I was thinking a braided shield would do nicely.

The question is, what should the shield be connected to? Should it be connected to somewhere on the robot frame, or should it be connected to ground-potential? (The negative lead on the battery)