Abstract
Determining the distance of the line-of-sight (LOS) of a small drone is essential in both regulating drone operation and drone operator training considering public safety. A field experiment was conducted to determine the LOS distance and visual angle of a small drone. Human participants were requested to observe a drone in one of the predetermined locations in the air. They responded whether they could see and hear the drone using a five-point scale. It was found that auditory signals were insignificant in drone detection because most of the participants could not hear the drone while they could still see the drone in most of the test locations. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to predict the probability of catching the drone visually. Two models were built considering the “definitely yes” and “definitely or probably yes” criteria of visual detection. These models may be used to estimate the LOS distance and visual angle. Assuming a 50% probability of visual catching and the “definitely or probably yes” criterion, the distance and visual angle of the LOS for the Mavic Air drone without a protector were approximately 307 m and 0.065°, respectively.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or commonly known as drones, have been adopted for military missions for decades
The purpose of this study is to determine the probability of visual detection of a small drone in the air in terms of drone distance
The probability of visual catch for the definitely yes” (DY) criterion averaged over all locations (0.29) was significantly (p < 0.001) lower than that of the definitely or probably yes” (DPY) criterion (0.44)
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or commonly known as drones, have been adopted for military missions for decades. With advancements of miniaturizing hardware, better affordability, and an easy-to-use design, UAVs are widely used in entertainment and applications in industry such as aerial photogrammetric survey [1], wildlife and coastal habitat monitoring [2], transportation engineering [3], parcel shipping [4], inspection of construction sites [5], disaster management [6], and movie filming [7]. Drones have even been preprogrammed to provide air shows in the night and many other entertainment purposes. UAVs with multiple propellers, especially the four-propeller ones, are widely used for commercial and personal purposes because of the performance in stability and flight control
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