When UAV manufacturer SenseFly wanted to show off their eBee drones, which are designed for aerial photography, they decided to try something different: Throwing their vehicles off the top of the Matterhorn.
At the top of the famous Alpine mountain, a team from SenseFly and nonprofit Drone Adventures flew the eBees on multiple flights and fed camera and sensor data into 3-D imaging software. Once they were done, SenseFly had the first ever UAV-generated map of the Matterhorn. Five drones circled the base and lower portions of the mountain, while another set of UAVs systematically mapped the mountain’s peak. And the Matterhorn, which straddles the border of Italy and Switzerland, is a massive mountain, which challenges the relatively modest battery life of most consumer drones. According to SenseFly, the eBee only has 45 minutes of battery life. As a result, the company had to fly their drones around the mountain on multiple flights.
