Skyfish shapes Sony camera firmware
Orest Pilskalns, CEO of Skyfish, on building autonomous drone infrastructure
This reveals that Skyfish was shaping the camera layer itself, not just bolting an off the shelf Sony camera onto a drone. In practice, fast firmware changes meant Skyfish could ask Sony to alter how the camera exposed controls and metadata, then test those changes almost immediately in flight. That matters in photogrammetry because image timing, camera pose data, and trigger behavior directly determine whether a drone produces survey grade models or a pile of hard to align photos.
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Skyfish built around utility and telecom inspection, where customers fly repeatable autonomous routes and need centimeter level measurements from towers, poles, and substations. In that workflow, small camera and firmware tweaks can materially improve geotagging, shutter control, and frame sync, which then improves model quality in Bentley and similar software.
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The Sony relationship appears to have gone beyond support tickets into product influence. Skyfish says it pushed for major API changes, worked directly with the program lead, and later became a lead North American partner on the ILX-LR1 program. Sony now markets the ILX-LR1 through its Camera Remote SDK for drone and remote imaging workflows, which fits the kind of integration Skyfish describes.
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This is a different position from rivals that mainly optimize flight software or downstream processing. Skydio emphasizes map capture, RTK and onboard modeling on its own aircraft, while DJI bundles Terra as the processing layer for its drones. Skyfish was trying to win one layer deeper, by tuning the sensor behavior itself for precision mapping jobs.
Going forward, the advantage compounds where drone vendors can co design camera firmware, flight control, and cloud processing as one system. That is how a drone stops being a generic aircraft with a camera and becomes a specialized measurement tool for infrastructure, where accuracy and repeatability matter more than raw flight autonomy alone.