Drone audition: Loudspeaker interior response modeling for making drones talk

Making drones talk is the next step in Human-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle interactions by installing an on-board loudspeaker array. However, due to the drone being loud, it creates an adverse noisy environment of very low signal-to-drone noise ratio (SDNR) levels (less than -10 dB) making it difficult to project a perceptual soundfield to a desired location on the ground. In this paper, we present a preliminary study on developing a sparsity-based interior response model of a commercial loudspeaker that can be used to modify the speech signals before playback through the loudspeaker. We incorporate the ground reflections into the incident response model of the real loudspeaker to simulate the outdoor environment. We validate the proposed model using soundfield recording over a larger region for low frequencies up to 114 Hz.