Synchronized Motors

[duane]

Our robot has two motors driving each drive transmission, one pair of motors on each side. This is a very common setup for drive systems.

With PWM control, one can use a Y adapter on the PWM cable to connect from one PWM output to both speed controllers.

Is something like this similar with CAN? Can two speed controllers be programmed to stay in synchronization?

And as a bonus question. We have an encoder on this transmission. We would like to use this encoder connected directly to the speed controllers and us position control and possibly speed control.

How would something like this be done?

A couple of possible solutions I can imagine:
1. Use some CAN commands to synchronize two speed controllers (I can imagine that this is wishful thinking)
2. Split the encoder connection and connect it to both speed controllers.

Thanks for tips and ideas.