ORIGINAL: kingwoodbarney
...Building UAV's in the manner in which you are proposing has become fairly commonplace and can be built almost entirely from "off the shelf" components. I don't know how impressive your thesis would be considering it is little more than purchasing consumer products and assembling them. It seems like a dead thesis walking to me...
I'm not so sure about that... there are a number of "consumer products" that would make constructing a UAV easier these days, but integrating all of these gadgets (GPS, gyros, accelerometers, and other types of sensors) with an embedded microprocessor or microcontroller system (small enough to fit in a model), and writing and debugging the controller code could still be a daunting task for just one person, depending on what the UAV is supposed to do. Not to mention developing hardware and code required for more complex functions like target identification and tracking... which would require some sort of digital video system and pattern recognition code. All of this would have to be field tested in the debugging process, and would likely involve some crashes and rebuilding of planes and equipment... time and $$$ intensive....
The UAVs that I've seen on the web (at least the one's that actually did anything interesting) were assembled by teams of engineering students, not just one guy.