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.

Working specs: 4 ft body (0.5 in foam), 8 ft wingspan with an 8 in chord (Clark Y target), 1 mile range target, future rotating-camera + video payload.

Motivation

I work in aerospace, and I wanted firsthand intuition for the production and manufacturing side — not just the digital systems around it. A low-cost UAV is the perfect bridge: it forces me to learn real hardware while staying close to software. The longer-term vision is holistic — connect a piece of real-world hardware back into the digital systems I work with, and find out whether an effective, low-cost information tool could come out of it.

Challenges

• Finalizing the wing/airfoil method — scripted Clark Y rib generation — and iterating the airframe in foam while holding cost down.
• Bringing real engineering rigor to a self-taught build — applying formal principles to get past a blocker that stalled my last iteration.

What I learned

• Aerodynamics, CAD/Fusion 360, and design-for-manufacture.
• How much more unforgiving hardware is than software — and how to close knowledge gaps fast and keep moving.

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.