Safety Padding Recommendations

[whoenig]

I am looking for safety padding for a lab that minimizes the risk of breaking quadrotors (CF 2.1, and Bolt-based custom drones) during a crash. I have used regular foam before with great success in terms of softness, but this poses an increased risk for fire (and smoke). Ideally, the padding should fulfill: 1) fire safety, 2) padding(softness), and 3) ESD properties. All the materials I've found so far, seem to violate at least one of the properties:

• regular foam is a fire hazard,
• fire-proof foam (Basotect) is not very soft and causes the CF to bounce, rather than absorbing the impact,
• fire-proof flooring as used in gyms is not soft (typically hard rubber),
• fire-proof carpet is problematic w.r.t. ESD (?)

I was wondering if anybody has some experience with operating Crazyflies on/around carpeted floor in particular with respect to electrostatic discharge (ESD) issues. If there are issues, would this lead to destruction or short-term malfunction, only? (E.g., I've seen the Crazyflie rebooting unexpectedly, when wearing a wool pullover.) Any other material tips would also be appreciated!

[kimberly]

We've set up artificial grass mats for the flight area when I was still at the MAVlab. It's great for preventing breakage, as it is not so thick and still provide enough protection.

Unfortunately there are a lot of ESD issues with this... so that was partly solved by spraying it once in a while with water and fabric softener but ofcourse this knowledge has been forgotten by now :p

The Crazyflies never broke with the ESD issues, but usually the imu was scrambled off so it would immediately flip after take off. That was very annoying.

Perhaps the static issues can be avoided if there was some kind of metal grid underneath connected to ground? For regular carpet it would probably be the same issue, albeit perhaps not so extreme.