Spain-based 3top turns off-the-shelf, lightweight drones (< €1,500; < 800 g)—readily available on any market—into a centimetre-accurate 3D mapping and recognition platform.
The portable solution runs on solar-rechargeable batteries and needs no internet connection. Operators can stay safely up to 5 km from the target. It scans a football field per minute, delivering live imagery, video within minutes, and a complete 3D map in one hour.
Compact enough to fit in a small backpack, it is already used in agriculture in Spain and Brazil but can just as easily be applied to defence and disaster response.
Thanks to the low cost and worldwide availability of these drones, fleets can be pre-positioned or activated locally—or even leverage civilian units already present in the affected area.
Leonan Vasconcelos is Co-Founder and CEO of 3top, a Spanish company that makes possible low-altitude aerial mapping with light drones to deliver on same day, high-resolution geospatial intelligence.
Backed by more than twenty years of international experience across Europe and the Americas, he is a Senior Data Scientist, Cloud Architect and AWS-certified AI Specialist. His career includes leading AI and computer-vision projects at Newtoms, orchestrating large-scale telecom infrastructures at Oracle, and managing virtual operator deployments at Pareteum.
At 3top he heads the development of platform that fuses semi-autonomous photogrammetry with bespoke vision models to create detailed 3D map — without the need for previous expertise — applicable for civil and defense scenarios, for example border protection.
Fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and drawing on a decade of hands-on forestry management in Brazil, Leonan bridges agricultural innovation, environmental stewardship and perimeter security. His objective at FEINDEF 25 (12–14 May 2025, Madrid) is to forge collaborations that integrate 3top’s agile geospatial analytics into logistics, critical-infrastructure protection and humanitarian-support programmes, thereby strengthening Europe’s sovereign defence supply chain with cost-effective, deploy-anywhere technology.