The CAN bus has had great acceptance in several areas such as industrial automation processes. Different solutions and profiles for standardising the communication between devices and systems have been well accepted. This paper presents a general introduction based on different areas in which the CAN protocol has been applied. In addition, a definition of the protocol's architecture and a description of the tools and devices of the system are presented. Finally, a development of methodology in the application to the automation and the results obtained in this work are shown. Thus, based on earlier experiences in the development of applications using the CAN protocol, principally with academic purposes, the authors present a study of the analysis of the CAN protocol applied to a real application like the robotic arm automation. The importance of this work increases due to the limited knowledge of the protocol implemented and the difficulty that the analysis carried out has into this real application.