United States Department of Transportation
i
Speech Intelligibility Assessment for an Unmanned Aircraft System Voice Test Bed
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2024-01-01
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By Konkel, Alex
[PDF-2.16 MB]
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Abstract:Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations are rapidly increasing in the National Airspace System (NAS). Since no pilot is on board the aircraft, reliable communications are especially important for UAS. In the near future, it will be highly desirable for UAS to be able to communicate with air traffic control (ATC) via typical radio frequencies as well as potentially with other UAS. To that end, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is evaluating the voice intelligibility of a UAS voice communications system. In this first evaluation phase, we evaluated voice intelligibility by having participants perform two tasks: the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) and Message Completion Test (MCT). These tests provide an objective measure of how well people can understand the audio coming through the communications system. Participants also completed questionnaires to provide subjective judgments of the audio quality. Participants completed the tests and questionnaires on the five current FAA voice switch systems, listening from both the controller and pilot station at different times. Some participants were tested with the UAS system in the loop and some on the voice switches alone. The results suggest that there are small differences in intelligibility on the different voice switches, and potentially depending on which station is listening. Notably, there was no statistical impact of the UAS communications system. The results support further testing of the UAS system in a higher-fidelity environment, and that the FAA voice switches be further evaluated for audio quality.
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