4 ms·

Drones are noisy. 100's of them flying in your neighborhood at once is a very bad plan.

corytheboyd 6y ago
This rarely comes up when the general topic of using drones to solve problems like this is discussed. Even just one drone is quite loud, I can’t imagine many of them. Next to my home. In flight potentially many times a day.
- ghaff 6y ago
  To my recollection, it comes up all the time. By all means, use drones to deliver emergency supplies and things like that. But buzzing around all day in a neighborhood? No thank you.
- Anechoic 6y ago
  For what it's worth, the big tech companies working on drone delivery (including Uber & Amazon) are aware of noise concerns and are working with noise control researchers to develop quieter drones and noise control criteria.
lallysingh 6y ago
There's a lot of active research on quiet drones. Expect that issue to get sorted out. Defense, law enforcement, etc are interested.
RandallBrown 6y ago
I'm not terribly worried about the noise of drones. While I don't have a ton of experience with the type of drones that could carry a payload of an average package, the ones I have seen aren't nearly as loud as something like a car. I'd rather there was less car noise too, but I can't imagine drones will be any worse and they'll reduce the even louder delivery trucks that currently drive up and down my street all day.
- bigiain 6y ago
  kI recon apart from my next door neighbours Harley (and, to be honest, probably my Ducati) by far the most traffic noise I notice at home has to be all the food delivery drivers on poorly maintained scooters, second only to parcel delivery drivers who leave their diesel vans idling out front while dropping off parcels.
bigiain 6y ago
As an anecdatapoint to refute that, I have about 7 or 8 working quadcopters right now. (No, more, at least 9.) All but one of them is totally silent from 100m up. Most of them I can't even make out the noise from 50m up. I don't think I'd be personally bothered too much by delivery drones that flew at ~100m and only dropped straight down to my or my neighbours houses to make final delivery. (But I live with a fair bit of aircraft noise already, I'm less than 1km from the main runway at Sydney airport and directly under it's flightpath, so perhaps my level of annoyance isn't typical.) My largest these days isn't exactly a heavy lifter though, 10 inch props capable of lifting a dslr and a reasonably heavy lens on a gimbal - probably 1 - 1.2kg or so of practical payload. I do occasionally play as camera operator of a friend's big octacopter - 16inch props carrying 3 gimballed dslrs (and 3 fixed gopros), so probably 5+kg payload, which is similarly quiet, imperceptible at 100m altitude. (My "noisy" one is one of my smallest, a 4inch prop FPV racing drone that runs 6 cells, it'll do close to 100mph straight up, and practically vanishes within 1 sec if you punch the throttle right open. But it's tiny little props are doing 60+k rpm at full throttle. It's very very annoyingly noisy when flown with vigour. Still hovers fairly quietly though, but its noisier in correcting for gusts than ess extreme 4inch sized quads.)
- deathlight 6y ago
  I haven't done any math on this but I suspect it could be possible that the sweet spot height of noise mitigation might be close to intersecting with the anti sweet spot of maximum damage from a fall/dropped payload.

This rarely comes up when the general topic of using drones to solve problems like this is discussed. Even just one drone is quite loud, I can’t imagine many of them. Next to my home. In flight potentially many times a day.

ghaff 6y ago
To my recollection, it comes up all the time. By all means, use drones to deliver emergency supplies and things like that. But buzzing around all day in a neighborhood? No thank you.
Anechoic 6y ago
For what it's worth, the big tech companies working on drone delivery (including Uber & Amazon) are aware of noise concerns and are working with noise control researchers to develop quieter drones and noise control criteria.

lallysingh 6y ago

There's a lot of active research on quiet drones. Expect that issue to get sorted out. Defense, law enforcement, etc are interested.

RandallBrown 6y ago

I'm not terribly worried about the noise of drones. While I don't have a ton of experience with the type of drones that could carry a payload of an average package, the ones I have seen aren't nearly as loud as something like a car. I'd rather there was less car noise too, but I can't imagine drones will be any worse and they'll reduce the even louder delivery trucks that currently drive up and down my street all day.

bigiain 6y ago
kI recon apart from my next door neighbours Harley (and, to be honest, probably my Ducati) by far the most traffic noise I notice at home has to be all the food delivery drivers on poorly maintained scooters, second only to parcel delivery drivers who leave their diesel vans idling out front while dropping off parcels.

bigiain 6y ago

As an anecdatapoint to refute that, I have about 7 or 8 working quadcopters right now. (No, more, at least 9.) All but one of them is totally silent from 100m up. Most of them I can't even make out the noise from 50m up. I don't think I'd be personally bothered too much by delivery drones that flew at ~100m and only dropped straight down to my or my neighbours houses to make final delivery. (But I live with a fair bit of aircraft noise already, I'm less than 1km from the main runway at Sydney airport and directly under it's flightpath, so perhaps my level of annoyance isn't typical.) My largest these days isn't exactly a heavy lifter though, 10 inch props capable of lifting a dslr and a reasonably heavy lens on a gimbal - probably 1 - 1.2kg or so of practical payload. I do occasionally play as camera operator of a friend's big octacopter - 16inch props carrying 3 gimballed dslrs (and 3 fixed gopros), so probably 5+kg payload, which is similarly quiet, imperceptible at 100m altitude. (My "noisy" one is one of my smallest, a 4inch prop FPV racing drone that runs 6 cells, it'll do close to 100mph straight up, and practically vanishes within 1 sec if you punch the throttle right open. But it's tiny little props are doing 60+k rpm at full throttle. It's very very annoyingly noisy when flown with vigour. Still hovers fairly quietly though, but its noisier in correcting for gusts than ess extreme 4inch sized quads.)

deathlight 6y ago
I haven't done any math on this but I suspect it could be possible that the sweet spot height of noise mitigation might be close to intersecting with the anti sweet spot of maximum damage from a fall/dropped payload.