Towards the Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Automatic Power Meter Readings

Most electric power companies employs power meter reader to collect data on the customer's energy consumption. Usually, this task is carried out manually, which can lead to high cost and errors, causing financial losses. Some approaches trying to minimize these problems, such as: discover the minimal route or use a car to perform the readings. However, errors associated the manual readings can still occurs and cars suffer with congestions and a high costs of the fuel consumption and to maintaining. In this work, we go further and propose an architecture to Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The main challenge of the solution is design a robust and lightweight protocol that is able to deal with the wireless communication collisions. Therefore, the main contribution of this work is the design a new protocol to ensure wireless communication from UAV to the power meters. We validated and evaluated the architecture in an urban scenario and the results show a decrease of time and distance respectively when compared to car approach. Our collision mechanism reaches an improved of 98% in reducing the messages collisions.