Name: Ring Drone Cam
Brand: Ring

Ring is finally selling the flying security camera it promised years ago. The Ring Drone Cam lifts off from a dock, flies preset routes through your home and streams what it sees to the Ring app, on a schedule, on demand or automatically when a Ring sensor, alarm or camera goes off. Instead of mounting a camera in every room, you get one camera that goes and looks.

The catch is where its brain lives. Ring moved the drone’s navigation off the device and into its cloud, a system it calls AI Pilot that combines the drone’s cameras, vision models and onboard sensors to map your home and steer around furniture. That made the drone light and cheap enough to sell, but it also ties a security device to your internet connection: if the Wi-Fi drops, the drone simply lands.

The hardware is tiny. The Drone Cam weighs 165 grams, records 2K video through a 148-degree lens and can spin in place for a full view of a room, with two LED lights that switch on in the dark. Setup means carrying it through your home once so AI Pilot can draw a floor plan and suggest patrol points, such as a back door or a ground-floor window. It also works with Amazon‘s new Alexa Home Map, where you tap a spot on a 3D view of your house and the drone plots its own route there. According to Wired, you can’t steer it by hand.

Getting here took a decade. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said the company has worked on an indoor drone since 2016 and came close to launching earlier versions, including the Always Home Cam it announced in 2020, before starting over with a simpler design. A drone that did all its thinking on board would have cost more than $5,000, he told Engadget.

Flight time is the clearest limit. Ring says the drone flies for roughly five to eight minutes per charge, and every minute in the air costs about eight minutes on the dock, so a full flight needs 40 minutes to an hour of charging. Engadget was quoted a slightly longer eight to ten minutes. Either way, this is a tool for quick check-ins, not round-the-clock monitoring, and The Verge noted that Ring did not demonstrate the stair flying or night lighting it promises.

Privacy is the harder sell. Ring says the camera stays off while the drone is docked, the dock covers the lens, and the propellers are deliberately noisy so the drone can’t sneak up on anyone. “It’s loud — we think that’s a feature. This thing is not gonna sneak up on you,” Siminoff told TechRadar. Footage is protected by Ring’s TAKE encryption, which rotates keys every few minutes and deletes Ring’s copies after a day. Ring still holds the key briefly to run its cloud AI features, so, as Wired pointed out, it is not true end-to-end encryption.

Ring’s record makes that pitch tougher. Critics have long accused the company of building a camera network that police can tap, and Thorin Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired that “the companies who make these sorts of surveillance products are invested in us feeling less safe at home.” A drone that maps every room and needs Amazon’s servers to move will test how far buyers are willing to extend that trust.

The drone launches alongside the Ring Rover Cam, a wheeled security robot for small businesses built on the hardware of Amazon’s discontinued Astro. It patrols for about 30 minutes, raises a 4K camera on a periscope mast to see over shelves, and carries a siren and two-way audio. At $999.99, it costs less than half the $2,349.99 Amazon charged for the business version of Astro before dropping it.

The Drone Cam costs $249.99 and ships in the US on January 27, 2027, with no preorders yet and no announced plans for other countries. Scheduled patrols and saved video need a Ring Protect subscription. The Rover Cam is on preorder now and ships on December 16. Retail drones will be dark gray, not white like the preproduction units shown to the press.

One hurdle remains. Ring’s own announcement says the Drone Cam has not yet been authorized under FCC rules, while Siminoff says it complies and is assembled in Texas. Ring has boxed up a home drone before and never shipped it.

Tags: amazon, Ring, drones, home security, Jamie Siminoff, Ring Drone Cam