From Bench to Flight: Translating Drone Impact Tests into Operational Safety Limits

Indoor micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) are increasingly considered for tasks that bring them in close proximity to people, yet practitioners lack a practical way to tune motion limits to measured impact risk. We present an end-to-end, open toolchain that turns benchtop impact tests into deployable safety governors for drones. First, we detail a compact, replicable impact rig and protocol that captures force-time profiles across drone classes and contact surfaces. Second, we provide data-driven fits that map pre-impact speed to impulse and contact duration, enabling direct computation of speed bounds for a target force limit. Third, we release scripts and a ROS2 node that enforce these bounds online and log compliance, with hooks for facility-specific policies. We target indoor MAV platforms with protective cages, focusing on bounding blunt contact forces of the airframe rather than propeller-strike hazards. We validate runtime enforcement in a closed-loop PX4-SITL/Gazebo setup (rotor-on dynamics), while physical rotor-on impact testing is left for future work. The contribution is a practical bridge: from measured impacts to runtime limits, with sharable datasets, code, and a repeatable process that teams can adopt to certify indoor MAV operations near humans.