A New Solution to Perform Automatic Meter Reading Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Typically, electric power companies employs a group of employees known as meter readers to collect data of energy consumption of customers. To overcome the challenges and limitations of the literature approaches, we propose an automatic meter reading system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Wireless Sensors Networks. In our approach, each electric meter has one sensor node device with wireless communication capability and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flies the field in a predefined way to collect data from the wireless sensor nodes without having to visit each electrical meter. Simulation results show that our approach reduces the distance to perform the readings compared to literature solutions. We also present a use case analysis considering real parameters for meter readings.