Monitoramento de veículos alternativos: desenvolvimento de um protótipo com tecnologia LoRaWAN

Abstract

This paper proposes a system for monitoring alternative vehicles of Lactec’s private corporate fleet through a LoRaWAN network. This technology exploits the unlicensed frequency band and presents low power consumption, besides long range, reducing operation costs of vehicle tracking applications in a limited area. The mobile device attached to the vehicles is based on Dragino LGT-92 open-source hardware while the LoRaWAN gateways are composed of a Raspberry Pi and a Radioenge RD43HATGPS shield. Open-source software provided by Semtech and the Chirpstack Community is used in the LoRaWAN infrastructure. The system is a viable alternative for monitoring electric scooters and bicycles, meeting the requirements with low operating costs compared to other network technologies and solving problems of lack of information of vehicles on the way between Lactec’s headquarters. The data collected allows the mobility system administrators to investigate the history of the vehicles to extract information, such as the use made by different clients, the routes taken by them, if there were crashes, the travel time between stations, among others. With the registration of the battery charge and discharge curves, it will be possible to determine whether a battery or vehicle has defects and, after generating a database through the use of the system, even predict them in order to schedule predictive maintenance. Finally, to transform the prototype into a product, improvements in the monitoring device and its coupling with the vehicle are necessary.