Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for precision agriculture face a fundamental design trade-off: multirotor platforms provide hovering capability but suffer from limited endurance, while fixed-wing aircraft offer superior range but require runways incompatible with small agricultural plots. This work presents the design and performance analysis of a low-cost tailsitter architecture, focusing on the novel integration of a frugal, minimalist hardware stack with an energy-optimized flight control system. This unique architecture achieves maximum power efficiency and stability, positioning the platform for widespread, accessible adoption in the precision agriculture domain. Considering this analysis of aircraft where seamless transition from the hover to the forward highlight is done for a niche understanding with the prospective level of flexibility compared with the traditional UAVs. This utility makes this class of UAVs well suited for a wide range of applications, including surveillance, transportation, and farming. Particularly in the agricultural sector there is a huge potential from the adoption of tailsitters with digitization becoming essential for improving agricultural yields. In developing economies, to address the cost barrier this work makes use of lightweight Depron material and off-the-shelf avionics to achieve a total production cost of approximately 140 USD (excluding camera/sensor). This work aims to propose a low-cost tailsitter with a custom flight controller that is power efficient, stable, manoeuvrable for precision farming and the low-cost architecture is a key technical design achievement that enables widespread adoption regardless of region. The present work affirms the aerodynamic design with propulsion efficiency by static analysis and simulation studies, therefore confirming its architectural suitability for precision agriculture. The 970-gram aircraft employs a custom flight controller built based on Teensy 4. 1 microcontroller, achieving 3300 Hz control loop rate. Performance analysis indicates that the vehicle is projected to consume significantly less power (3. 05 W/min) compared to the power consumption of a quadcopter (6. 1 W/min), showcasing power efficiency. Additionally, with a static thrust-to-weight ratio of 1. 67: 1, the VTOL demonstrates excellent stability and manoeuvrability, enabling extremely short take-off runs and vertical climb-outs.
Aswin et al. (2026) studied this question.