UAS-Noisecheck: A system implementing the EASA Guidelines on drone noise measurement

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are on the rise and are about to transform civil aviation. As their proliferation grows, the social and legal acceptance of drones is becoming increasingly important, particularly with regard to noise pollution. So far, the lack of standardized methods and systems to measure in-flight noise emissions of UAS has hindered the creation of legal frameworks. To close this gap, the EASA introduced guidelines for UAS noise measurement in October 2022, for which feedback is currently being collected on their practical implementation and measurement results. In this work, we present UASNoiseCheck, a prototype system designed to implement these guidelines. It integrates acoustic, visual, GNSS and meteorological components to enable comprehensive, multisensory data acquisition and thus represents a novelty in the multimodal metrological description of UAS. Since our system not only contains a single microphone as a sound level meter but also features a hemispherical 32-microphone array, it can also facilitate the certification and regulation of noise emissions when used in the context of drone detection and localization. In initial field experiments, we analyze noise emissions of different multicopter UAS recorded with a ground-based and an inverted microphone setup as well as the microphone array.