Low-Cost Foam UAV

Overview

A UAV built from rigid foam insulation, designed around a single driver: cost. Goal — a plane that flies ~1 mile carrying a rotating camera for a live video feed to the controller, cheap enough to eventually produce in quantity.

Motivation

One of my first assignments at work was cost focused. I am not a finance person and I had little insight into the real complexity present in Aerospace. This UAV project helped bridge gaps in my understanding between the real-world and what I was doing at work. It was a major value add. I was able to apply the cost skills I learned at work, while gaining firsthand intuition for the production and manufacturing side.

Challenges

• Airfoils… If I can’t manufacture at scale, I’m not interested. Scale and cost are the top goal. I can bust out a handful of bodies in an afternoon, but I still don’t have a good way of producing a repeatable airfoil. I am exploring the build of a hot-wire CNC machine.

What I learned

• It is tough to make something fly.
• If something is in the air, it is a wholistic system that relies on every single component working in sync and without error.

Status & next steps

Airframe iterating; wing/airfoil method being finalized. Next: get it airborne, then add the rotating-camera/video payload with YOLOv5-based computer vision, and connect the platform back into digital systems for a full real-world-to-digital loop.