Ring is finally shipping a flying indoor drone camera. For real this time. The Ring Drone Cam will arrive on January 27, 2027 for $249.99, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said at a launch event in New York this week. If it actually ships, it will arrive nearly six years after the company announced its first flying camera, the Ring Always Home Cam.
Designed to patrol the inside of your home when you’re not there, the Drone Cam is an AI-powered drone that can respond to triggers from Ring sensors, such as detecting motion, a door opening, a water leak, or an audible alarm. When triggered, it follows pre-programmed routes to a set location, where it can live stream and record what’s happening in the Ring app.
The drone can also carry out scheduled patrols around your home or be dispatched on demand. It offers 2K resolution, a 148-degree field of view, and since it’s mobile, it can cover 360 degrees. The edge I was able to test the new flying camera during the launch event.
Ring’s point here is that the Drone Cam can replace the need for multiple cameras in your home while still allowing you to see what’s happening anywhere in your home in the event of an incident.
It’s designed for indoor use only and the company says it has built-in privacy: it only records in flight. The drone’s camera is closed when docked, and it’s extremely loud when flying, so there’s no way it can sneak in and invade your privacy.
Drone Cam images are encrypted using Ring’s new TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption) system, which rotates encryption keys every five minutes and deletes Ring’s copies after 24 hours, limiting Amazon’s access while allowing cloud processing for features like smart alerts and AI-based video search.
During the event, I saw the Drone Cam take flight and was able to test the device. It’s a completely different product from the Always Home Cam announced in 2020. It’s significantly smaller, about a quarter the size of the model I saw demoed at CES in 2023, weighing 165 grams. A small camera is built into its body, instead of hanging in the center.
Ring claims the Drone Cam can fly for five to eight minutes on a charge, and for every minute of flight, it takes eight minutes of charging, meaning a five-minute flight requires about 40 minutes of charging. This short flight time suggests that the product is better suited to quick recordings than continuous monitoring, and it remains to be seen whether it can actually replace multiple fixed cameras.
In this week’s demo, I saw it take a one-minute flight, take off from its dock, hover, then follow a pre-planned route around a simple living room layout. Unlike the CES demo, this time I was able to see the drone take off and land several times, then cruise smoothly with virtually no wobble.
According to Ring, the Drone Cam can climb stairs and uses LED spotlights to help it see in the dark and deter potential intruders – but Ring hasn’t demonstrated this. The drone apparently follows pre-planned flight paths you set in the Ring app and will navigate around any obstacles it encounters along those routes. However, I haven’t been able to see it interact with obstacles or anything unexpected – I’m particularly curious how animals will react to it.
Siminoff said Ring has been developing the drone since 2016 and came close to shipping two different models during that time before landing on the current version. Siminoff explained that they struggled to fit all the technology needed for an autonomous drone to fly around your home into a practical design for less than $250. About a year ago, they decided to start from scratch and build a much more basic drone that could fly reliably while putting its brains in the cloud.
Ring has developed AI Pilot, a new AI system that combines the device’s camera with vision models, sensors and cloud processing to map your home and allow the drone to autonomously navigate around obstacles, while relying on pre-programmed routes. “In reality, it’s like an AI agent that controls the robot,” Siminoff said. The downside is that it relies entirely on an internet connection, which is a potential point of failure for a home security product; without Wi-Fi, all it can do is land.
The Drone Cam is launching in the US only as part of a new Ring Robotics line alongside the Ring Rover Cam, a $999.99 autonomous security robot for businesses built on Amazon’s Astro home robot. Rover also uses AI Pilot and is available for pre-order now, with delivery expected to begin December 16, 2026.
Both security devices work like any other Ring camera, streaming and sending recorded video to the Ring app and requiring a Ring Protect plan for video storage and advanced features. They will also work with Amazon’s upcoming Alexa Home Map to understand your home and the location of sensors and other devices.
Although Siminoff seems confident that the drone will launch in January as planned, Ring says it is currently “in the process of obtaining FCC certification.” Asked about the FCC’s ban on foreign-made drones, Siminoff said the Ring Drone Cam “complies” with FCC regulations and noted that it was assembled in the United States. It’s normal for new gadgets to go through this process, but drones are now facing more scrutiny.
Ring ushered in a world of new privacy questions when its cameras began entering homes more than a decade ago. Over the past year, the company’s new technologies have sparked fears that they could enable a surveillance state. An AI-driven drone that can map your home, fly from room to room, and rely on the cloud to operate is sure to raise new privacy questions when it next hits the market. year.
Photos by Victoria Barrios / The Verge
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