How Marble Uses Onshape to Double Engineering Productivity and Accelerate Autonomous Aircraft Development

Collecting detailed, up-to-date environmental data in the farthest reaches of the Arctic is both difficult and expensive. Satellites can cover vast areas, but high-resolution imagery is costly, high latency, and can be obstructed by cloud cover. Manned aircraft and many conventional drone operations require pilots, technicians, fuel, runways, and other infrastructure that are difficult to support and service across remote regions.

Marble set out to make that data far more attainable. Founded in 2016, the UK-based startup is developing a new model for remote data collection built around fleets of high-speed, low-cost, electric unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Their aircraft operate from fully autonomous robotic hangars that house, charge, and communicate back to the Marble team, reducing the need for onsite day-to-day hangar management in remote locations.

A single hangar supports multiple aircraft and creates what Marble calls an “intelligence bubble” extending up to 250 kilometers from its location. Working together, the UAVs capture high-resolution imagery across thousands of square kilometers in a single flight, generating 3D models of ice sheets, fjords, and other terrain based on customer requirements.

“We want to remove the burden of collecting data from the customer,” explains Frederico Rodrigues, Marble Head of Engineering. “The customer should only have to care about what data they are collecting and when.”

Today, the team is concentrating their efforts heavily on research and development work in Greenland, supporting scientific efforts to improve models of the Greenland Ice Sheet and identify potential climate tipping points.

“With the current political climate, it is quite a breath of fresh air to be developing robotic systems to solve big, critical environmental problems,” Rodrigues says.

Leaving File Management Chaos Behind

Before Onshape, Marble iterated through a few CAD platforms, however, file-based data management repeatedly slowed collaboration, even for the small team.

“It was always, ‘Do you have this file open?’ or, ‘Is this the right version for this design?’” Rodrigues recalls. “We were manually tracking files and creating folders for each date we made changes. It worked with two people, but it was not scalable at all.”

Because the team’s master models contain hundreds of features and references, mixing the wrong files could trigger hours of fault-finding or break downstream geometry. Crashes could erase a day’s work. The risk made the engineers more cautious about large design changes, even when a more ambitious redesign might produce a better aircraft.

They discovered the Onshape Startup Program in 2024, just as the company was increasing the pace and scope of development. The program, which provides free Onshape licenses to qualified startups at no cost, made cloud-native CAD & PDM accessible while allowing Marble to direct more of its funds back to the product.

Once they committed to the transition, Rodrigues says, “there was absolutely no going back.”

Onshape eliminated the need for Marble to coordinate access to individual files or wonder whether a model was current. Every engineer can work in the same shared design environment, with a complete history of changes and the ability to restore designs to any previous version.

“The biggest impact on our business was making us more ambitious and less afraid of making mistakes, because they are now relatively easy to fix,” Rodrigues says.

Modern CAD Supports Rapid Iterations of 3D-Printed Aircraft

Marble’s business model depends on making their system affordable enough to deploy at scale. That means keeping the aircraft compact, using commercial off-the-shelf components where possible, and manufacturing as much as they can in-house.

The company’s MRB5 aircraft is built almost entirely from fiberglass-infused 3D-printed material. Its fuselage can be produced as one large, highly complex print rather than an assembly of dozens or hundreds of conventional parts. Once the team consolidates a design, it can print, test, and fly the next iteration without waiting for tooling or committing to costly manufacturing processes like injection molding.

That freedom is essential because Marble’s engineers are still learning what their aircraft must withstand to operate for three to six months with minimal maintenance. They build the aircraft quickly in the UK, perform flight tests to identify any failures, and rapidly redesign the affected systems. A newer Canadian operation adds manufacturing capacity and allows the team to accumulate flight hours in an environment similar to Arctic conditions.

This rapid build-test-learn cycle places unusual demands on the company’s CAD workflows. Five engineers now support Marble’s product development, with three regularly accessing CAD models across the UK and Canada. Their work spans both the aerodynamically driven, heavily surfaced aircraft and a more mechanically complex robotic hangar system.

Doubling Productivity While Expanding Scope

Marble estimates that Onshape’s cloud-native capabilities have made the team at least 2X more productive. That improvement is not simply a matter of completing the same work faster; it gives engineers the freedom to attempt larger redesigns, explore several “mini iterations” in a week, and add or remove more features during each cycle.

“We are not afraid to take large risks in terms of changing the shape of the aircraft and its subsystems,” Rodrigues says. “Before, it was one and a half people working on CAD because we could not work at the same time.”

With their on-premise CAD system, Rodrigues recalls spending roughly two weeks on what was then considered a significant, but relatively limited, fuselage change. Today, the team can use testing data to redesign an entire part or section of the aircraft, ground-test the solution, and return it to manufacturing in as little as one week.

At the same time, the scope of Marble’s engineering work has grown substantially. The team is continuously modifying not only their aircraft but also developing robotic hangars that will house, charge, and service the UAVs without needing personnel onsite in remote locations.

Accelerating Design Iterations with Branching and Merging

Marble now organizes its fast-moving aircraft development around Onshape’s built-in branching and merging capabilities. A typical design loop lasts from three weeks to six weeks, with the team exploring alternative changes on branches while manufacturing and ground testing continue in parallel.

Successful changes can then be merged into the primary design. Ideas that don’t work can be left behind without disrupting the rest of the model. If a ground test reveals a needed adjustment while another aircraft is already in production, the team can develop the fix independently and merge it when it is ready.

“We can work with CAD as if we were building code,” Rodrigues explains. “For us, that has been very, very powerful.”

The fully visible design history also gives Marble a practical safety net. When an engineer accidentally deleted an assembly several versions earlier, they simply merged back only the missing assembly and preserved the team’s subsequent work. The Repair tool helps resolve broken references, while named versions and releases make it easy to move between current designs and the last known good configuration.

Before sending a new aircraft to print, Marble compares the latest model with the version previously released to manufacturing. Differences that once required assembling and validating files from separate folders can now be reviewed together in hours, helping the team catch an overlooked movement, misalignment, or clash before production.

Building Custom CAD Tools to Automate Aerospace Workflows

Marble uses Onshape’s surfacing tools extensively to define the aircraft’s outer mold line, internal surfaces, skin thickness, and stiffeners. Because the MRB5 is optimized for SLA printing and contains relatively few but highly complex parts, its design workflow differs from more traditional mechanical assemblies.

Custom features help the team adapt familiar aerospace processes to that environment. Marble has used custom features, which run on Onshape's native programming language, FeatureScript, to create tools for generating airfoil profiles, controlling complex splines, and improving offsets. An airfoil custom feature, for example, replaces the manual process of importing profile data from a spreadsheet and constructing a spline point by point.

The team has also begun using Claude generative AI to help develop and troubleshoot its custom features code. The combination of Onshape’s custom features and AI tools have made them more ambitious about automating repetitive or complex work.

Onshape’s support team has helped Marble restructure models containing hundreds of features, improve resource management, and refine its approach to advanced surfacing. Rodrigues says the access to responsive support and one-on-one technical guidance has been especially valuable for a lean startup tackling an unconventional aerospace workflow.

One Collaborative Design Environment Keeps Ideas Moving Forward

With their manufacturing operations growing in Canada, Marble can collaborate on editable designs or read-only versions directly with remote team members. Canadian colleagues can inspect current geometry, comment on a design, or correct an issue without waiting for a drawing, export, or screenshot from the UK team.

Onshape being available 24/7 through any web browser also keeps engineers on track without requiring specialized CAD workstations. Marble uses lightweight Microsoft Surface laptops without dedicated graphics hardware — devices that wouldn’t be compatible with traditional CAD platforms.

James Howling, UAV Design Lead, put that flexibility to the test while visiting an island off the north coast of Scotland. When an urgent design issue arose during his trip, he connected his laptop to Starlink internet and completed significant CAD changes with no other infrastructure.

“I was sitting with these beautiful Scottish Highland views while doing high-level CAD,” Howling says. “It ran on my laptop perfectly with no issues.”

Building, Testing, Learning, and Building Again

Marble’s long-term goal is to deploy networks of autonomous aircraft and robotic hangars around the world, generating planetary data that can improve environmental monitoring and models of critical changes to the Greenland Ice Sheet or the seasonal opening of the Northwest Passage.

Achieving that vision requires a system that is produced affordably, operates reliably in extreme environments, and evolves quickly as real-world testing reveals new lessons.

“We cannot afford to overcomplicate things,” Rodrigues says. “We need to get out there, build, test, learn, and build again. The way Onshape has been built is exactly what enables those types of businesses.”

For Marble, removing the clerical work between an idea and the next test is not just a productivity improvement. It’s what gives a small engineering team the freedom to pursue an ambitious new model for understanding some of the most remote and rapidly changing places on Earth.