Comparing the Human Response of Unmanned Aircraft System Noise and Other Transportation Noise

Green, Nathan; Torija Martinez, Antonio

Abstract

An experiment was designed to investigate the perception of noise from different Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) alongside three other vehicle types, including road traffic, conven tional aircraft, and helicopters. The aim of this experiment was to understand how perceived loudness and annoyance vary between the vehicle types and the factors that would influence these differences. Participants were presented with a total of 70 stimuli and asked to rate their annoyance and the perceived loudness of the stimuli. The results of the experiment in dicate that for the stimuli used participants generally found the aircraft to be most annoying, followed by helicopter, then UAS and finally road traffic. An offset analysis was used to cal culate the difference in sound level (∆dB) measured in LAeq, LAE, LASmax and Loudness (N) to achieve the same annoyance and perceived loudness for the different types of vehicles. The analysis identified significant reductions in sound level of the UAS stimuli,-13.2 dB LAE and-17.2 dB LASmax, were required to equal annoyance with road traffic. ∆dB values calculated for equal annoyance with helicopters (+0.6 dB LAE and +3.3 dB LASmax and aircraft (-0.5 dB LAE and +2.0 LASmax) were relatively low when compared to road traffic. Analysis of UAS stimuli where highlighted that both the mean perceived loudness and the % highly annoyed (HAN) can still vary significantly even when participants reported a similar mean annoyance response. The reasons for these variations in response are considered to be caused by both acoustic and non-acoustic factors. Further research is recommended that investigates both the acoustic and non-acoustic factors influencing human response to UAS noise.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Start Date: Sep 8, 2024
• End Date: Sep 11, 2024
• Acceptance Date: Sep 8, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Nov 26, 2024
• Publication Date: Nov 26, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 26, 2024
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17866/rd.salford.27886197.v1