Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf.
Building something like that is fairly trivial. What the article doesn’t talk about is the sensor or communications package these things will carry. I suspect the $2000 price tag doesn’t include any of that.
For $2000 it better have something. The real question is how good though - $2000 greatly limits what you can do, but a pi, 5 mile radio, and a camera well fit into that budget, while a full AI system that can navigate without GPS someplace and then decide on a target cannot.
I suspect it does include that, because otherwise I’d expect it to cost more like $200, if not even less.