An embedded multichannel sound acquisition system for drone audition
This addresses the problem of limited acoustic sensing capabilities for drone researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing drone audition algorithms.
The authors tackled the lack of multichannel sound acquisition systems on commercial drones by developing an embedded system with eight microphones and a recorder mounted on a quadcopter, enabling simultaneous recording and wireless transfer of audio for processing.
Microphone array techniques can improve the acoustic sensing performance on drones, compared to the use of a single microphone. However, multichannel sound acquisition systems are not available in current commercial drone platforms. To encourage the research in drone audition, we present an embedded sound acquisition and recording system with eight microphones and a multichannel sound recorder mounted on a quadcopter. In addition to recording and storing locally the sound from multiple microphones simultaneously, the embedded system can connect wirelessly to a remote terminal to transfer audio files for further processing. This will be the first stage towards creating a fully embedded solution for drone audition. We present experimental results obtained by state-of-the-art drone audition algorithms applied to the sound recorded by the embedded system.