A Lightweight Solution to perform Automatic Meter Reading using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

typically, electric power companies employ a group of employees known as power meter readers to collect data on the customer´s energy consumption. This activity is carried out manually, which can lead to errors and cause financial and physical losses. There are several approaches with the aim at minimizing the aforementioned problems. These approaches propose different methodologies to discover routes that are more efficient for the power meter readers while performing their tasks. However, the problems associated with manual readings may occur even when the routes are more efficient. In addition, there are some proposals to achieve the automatic meter readings using cars. However, these proposals are limited to traffic congestions and present a high cost in terms of fuel. To overcome these challenges and limitations in the literature efforts, we propose an automatic meter reading system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The results show that our approach has two key contributions compared to other solutions in the literature: (i) power meter readers are no longer necessary; (ii) it reduces the time to perform the readings from the electric meters.