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Two Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) spin-offs, senseFly and Pix4D, have successfully modelled the Matterhorn in 3D with an unprecedented level of detail. It took three drones, weighing under a kilo each and armed with digital cameras, just six hours to map the entire mountain.

The flying robots emerged from EPFL's Intelligent Systems Laboratory (LIS) where they were designed to fly autonomously, making the six-hour task exceptionally accurate and simple to manage. Once a preprogrammed flight path has been transferred onto the drones, they were able to fly entirely unaided for the duration. The launch process however, was decidedly unremarkable; each drone was thrown into the air by hand.

Three of the drones were launched from a 3,000m base-camp, with the fourth taking flight from the summit at 4,478m above sea level, capturing more than 2,000 high-resolution photographs of the mountain. Once the photographs had been taken, Pix4D, another EPFL spin-off from the Computer Vision Lab (CVLab), assembled them into a 300-million-point 3D model. The model was presented last weekend to participants of the Drone and Aerial Robots Conference (DARC), in New York, by Henri Seydoux, CEO of the French company Parrot.

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