How Busy Can the Sky Get? AgentFly Simulates the Future of Urban Drone Traffic

With the ImAFUSA Project concluding on 28/2/2026, the following post was written by AgentFly Technologies to provide an overview of their work and results in the project.

Drones are on their way to becoming part of everyday city life — delivering small packages, monitoring infrastructure, or supporting emergency responders. But as drones become more common, a key question emerges:

How will large numbers of drones affect people living in the city below?

As part of the ImAFUSA project, AgentFly Technologies focused on answering this question using what we specialize in: large-scale simulations of drone traffic in real urban environments.

Bringing the Human Perspective Into the Digital Sky

Our task was to build a simulation environment capable of representing not just drone movement, but also how that movement may impact people on the ground.

Using data provided by project partners — such as visual perception, noise perception, and safety perception of different drone operations — along with population density maps, we integrated these elements into one unified model.

This allowed us to simulate thousands of drone flights over a city and see where people might be most affected, and how different drone traffic strategies change that impact.

Testing What Happens When Drone Traffic Grows

We ran simulations under a wide range of conditions, from dozens of drones to over a thousand flying at once.

For each scenario, the system assessed how operations changed the experience for people in different parts of the city.

Our simulations showed:

Higher drone density increases perceived disruption.

As more drones enter the airspace, areas with higher population density experience a stronger impact on visual and noise perception.

Restricted zones shift the impact rather than remove it.

When drones are rerouted around protected areas (for example, places sensitive to noise or visual disturbance), traffic becomes more concentrated elsewhere — increasing perceived impact for those neighborhoods.

Safety perception can also vary with traffic flow.

When restricted zones force drone paths closer together, conflict probability rises, which in turn correlates with reduced perceived safety on the ground.

The result is a detailed picture of how different policy or design choices influence the human experience of drone operations.

Why This Matters

Cities need more than just safe drone routes — they need drone operations that people feel comfortable living with.

Our work shows that with the right data, large-scale simulations can reveal the trade-offs between operational needs and public comfort.

By combining real-world perception data, population information, and advanced airspace modeling, AgentFly Technologies is helping cities understand:

• how many drones they can reasonably host,

• where drone routes should be placed, and

• how to minimize disruption for residents.

With these tools, we’re moving toward a future where drone operations are not only efficient and safe but truly people-friendly.