Toolkit for noise and societal impact assessment of u-space-enabled drone operations

Our vision is to develop a toolkit for the assessment of noise, societal and ecological impacts of new aviation entrants in U-Space. The toolkit will facilitate the sustainable deployment of new aviation entrants, with a focus on Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS), and the development of policy recommendations and U-Space guidelines. Current drone noise models are limited in their capacity to account for the diversity of drone types and operating conditions, and seldom integrate societal or ecological impact metrics. This project will pioneer an integrated, ML-powered toolkit that not only models acoustic impact across various urban, peri-urban and rural scenarios, but also links noise exposure to human perception and wildlife disturbance, advancing scientific understanding and practical application in U-space environments. Building upon a series of case studies carefully designed to ensure representativeness and allow consideration of several interrelated factors (e.g., visual pollution, safety, privacy, public acceptance, impact of noise of people and wildlife), our project will make three significant contributions to the state of the art: (1) a model for drone sound source accounting for the wide variety of vehicle types and operational conditions, (2) definition of thresholds of public acceptance for drone noise, under varying operation scenarios, and (3) extension of noise model to assess the impact of drone noise on wildlife.The expected end game is that for a user coming with a set of drone operations data (e.g. per flight 4D trajectory data) on a given area, the user would be able to import such trajectories into a dedicated part of the toolkit which should then return the corresponding estimated exposure of humans and wildlife.