This isn’t the company’s first at-home drone camera. CEO and founder Jamie Siminoff says he had the idea for a flying sentry in 2016 before Amazon bought Ring. The company previously announced an indoor security drone in 2020—the Ring Always Home Cam—and nearly launched it last year. But Siminoff says the team kept running into edge cases that forced them to add more sensors. Those additions required more computing resources and made the drone more power- and battery-hungry, and made it harder to fly. The new solution? Move the intelligence off the vehicle and into the cloud.
The Drone Cam has enough smarts to land if it loses internet connectivity, but the rest of its intelligence now sits entirely in the cloud; the drone sends video straight to Ring’s servers, where a custom “AI Pilot” agent tells it where to go. That lets the drone be lightweight and nimble.
It will avoid people and objects, and if you accidentally manage to stick a finger into the propellers, Siminoff says you will feel it, but “you’ll be fine.” If your cat manages to swat it out of the air, however, that’s a different story. A Ring spokesperson tells WIRED customers shouldn’t “fly it” if it’s damaged and should contact support for help (no word on repairability). The Drone Cam runs a motor health check before take-off every time and won’t fly if it detects a problem.
Users can’t manually control the drone, but can set up custom flight routes and patrol schedules. It can automatically respond to alerts from security sensors you may have set up in the home, like motion, door, or window sensors. It will not leave your home, as it needs a Wi-Fi network to operate and uses the Alexa Home Map you may have created with existing Echo devices to help it navigate. It can fly around five to eight minutes per charge. (Also, the final production model will be black, not white like in the pictures.)
“There are times when you do want to just be able to see everywhere around the home, but you don’t necessarily want a [fixed] camera,” Siminoff says. “That’s why we invented Ring Robotics.”