Amazon has launched the Ring Drone Cam, a tiny indoor security drone, along with the Ring Rover Cam, as the first two products of its new Ring Robotics category of autonomous, mobile home security devices. The Drone Cam is priced at $249.99 and will ship on January 27, 2027. It has been at least six years since Amazon first teased an in-home security camera in the form of a drone, and Ring founder Jamie Siminoff says that the company has worked on a drone concept since 2016. The device weighs 165 grams and is basically a small quadcopter with cameras onboard, including a 2K camera and two LEDs at the front, a 1080p camera on the underside and an LED at the bottom for illumination. The lights help in dark corners, and they can also deter intruders at night, since moving lights can resemble a security guard with a flashlight.
The Drone Cam can fly on preset schedules, as if it were on patrol, or it can chart a flight path when a motion sensor or leak sensor goes off in the home. Users can also start a flight manually. It works with the Alexa Home Map that Amazon announced last month, which gives a 3D view of the house, so users can tap a spot on the map and the drone will chart its own course to the destination. The battery supports about eight to 10 minutes of air time, depending on altitude, and the drone will land or return to its dock when its power is low or when it loses a Wi-Fi connection. Eight minutes of charging delivers enough power for one minute of flight.
Siminoff said that earlier versions of the drone were not good enough to launch, since adding sensors and computing power required more power and bigger batteries, and a heavier drone had to fly harder, which created safety concerns and led to larger shrouds that affected flight performance. Doing all of that in the device would have pushed its price past $5,000. What allowed Ring to reduce weight and price was cloud processing, which the company calls the AI Pilot. It powers both devices, and it maps the space, suggests patrol points and navigates around obstacles. Amazon says that privacy is the default, since the drone powers down and turns off its camera when it is in its base and records only when a flight is triggered, and that videos from both devices are protected by TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption), which it calls its strongest default encryption yet.
The Ring Rover Cam costs $999.99, and it is similar to the Astro robot that was announced in 2021, which Ring says inspired it, based on customer feedback that roving security was the feature that they liked most. It has a tablet for a face, a camera that extends up to four feet on a periscope, a 4K camera, a siren, a light tower that projects a blue ring onto the ceiling and flashes red when the siren sounds, and a speaker and microphone for two-way talk. It is designed for enterprise uses such as warehouse monitoring and patrols for small to medium businesses, and it can stream and record on the way to a destination. Even when docked, it watches for personal motion and records as soon as it detects it. The Alexa Home Map software was released with the Rover Cam on December 16. Amazon says both devices are designed to be seen and heard, although the propellers of the drone are noisy, so it is unlikely to be flown for more than a few minutes in a home.
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