A basic UAV is just "catalogue engineering" these days. I've got a 2m wingspan model that'll be taking its first flight in a week or so total dammage so far is about $500 and I'm yet to use a soldering iron on it. I know Andrew is working on a more substantial vehicle.
There are at least 3, budget, autonomous flight controllers available.

PK

Sorry to run way of topic
Scoop
It is fairly stable but it also depends how good you can hover the thing aswell. An aluminum chassis is currently under construction as we have found there is a bit of flex and twist on the directional rotor arm, that upsets the gyros. Doug has hovered it at around the 10m mark but he is keen to take it much higher. He transmits live video footage back to the ground and you can watch it with goggles or on a monitor
His other marvelous plane is this Foamy DC-3, Equipped with a 270 deg Panable camera , video transmitter, gps and fly's it with a force control joy stick whilst watching a monitor (or goggles ) with an on screen display with heading, battery life, altitude, lat/long speed etc. I am currently modifying/ reinforcing a small scale model of a UAV Predator that we hope to fly with all the fruit in it.

Had a go at first person flying with head tracking a few years ago good fun and the price is coming down.

HI everyone. I remembered about this post the other day and thought i would let everyone know how the project was going.

I decided to go with a ducted fan for simplicity (as a proof of concept). The fan is 90mm and uses a rather large brushless motor that on max thrust (about 4.5kg) uses about 2.5kW of power!

I have finished the majority of the airframe just have to mount all the electronics on top. Then i can start the fun part......Programming! I plan on using a PID controller for each axis (and a 4th for roll) getting one axis stable at a time (fixing it in the other two). I am using a relatively cheap 6 degree accelerometer and gyro package that will accumulate errors relatively quickly so i don't expect more than a 1 minute hover before the error gets too large. The batteries wont last much longer than that anyway!

I may also need to add in a small motor with a spinning mass to control roll in the z axis, although i am hopping to avoid it with a combination of initial bleeding out of torque and fins.



Here is a quick video of the motor being actuated:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRPqYd5k6Q

You may notice the ear muffs on the table..... when its going the fan is really really loud!

That's an interesting piece of work there JS, I was discussing EDF units with Doug for a tri copter configuration and Doug pointed out to me that allot of the speed controllers on the market aren't up to scratch for controlling high rpm motors smoothly, this is the case with one of our EDF planes, the speed of the motor jumps in steps which could make hover control difficult.
Keep posting
Steve

As Steve said, it looks like an interesting project. Please keep us updated.

TP