Challenges of Drive-By IoT Sensing for Smart Cities: City Scanner Case Study

Fixed sensor stations are the primary means to collect environmental data in cities. Yet, their high cost of deployment and maintenance often result in an accurate but geographically-sparse monitoring. We advocate for a drive-by approach to urban sensing in which vehicles are used as sensors to scan the city with a high spatiotemporal resolution. We present City Scanner, a highly-customizable, self-sufficient platform that allows for cost-efficient drive-by sensing. City Scanner modules can be deployed on existing vehicles (e.g. busses and taxis) without interfering with their operations. We describe our first prototype that includes sensing modules for air quality, temperature, humidity, and thermal imaging. We discuss the challenges we encountered during an 8-months deployment of the platform on trash trucks in order to derive implications for the design of future drive-by sensing systems.