Urban data collectors: A pragmatic approach to leveraging urban sensing

This paper proposes the adoption of a more pragmatic approach to urban sensing to leverage the initial offering of open databases within the context of smart cities. In this sense, the use of mobility agents already available to provide mobility to traditional sensors can enable a preliminary instrumentation of cities more quickly and possibly at a lower cost. As proof of concept, we investigated the use of metropolitan bus equipped with sensors such as urban data collectors. We believe that this strategy can help overcoming many challenges of traditional approaches for instrumentation of cities, such as power supply, maintenance, operation, and protection of a large amount of static sensors. To assess the feasibility of sampling by collectors, we conducted experiments comparing averages using frequent readings vs averages using intermittent readings collected by sensors of a climatological micro station.