A Robust and Lightweight Protocol for Efficient and Scalable Automatic Meter Reading using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

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 tries to minimize these problems, such as: find 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 Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). One of the challenge of this 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 evaluated the protocol in an urban scenario and the results show a decrease of messages collisions up to 98%.