The Drone Cam is the spiritual successor to the Always Home Cam. While that never shipped, Ring says its new drone will be ready to fly into homes this January.
The Drone Cam is the spiritual successor to the Always Home Cam. While that never shipped, Ring says its new drone will be ready to fly into homes this January.
Ring is finally shipping a flying indoor drone camera. For real this time. The Ring Drone Cam will arrive on January 27th, 2027, for $249.99, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said at a launch event in New York City this week. If it does actually ship, it will arrive almost six years after the company announced its first flying camera, the Ring Always Home Cam.
Designed to patrol inside your home when you’re not there, the Drone Cam is an AI-powered drone that can react to triggers from Ring sensors, such as detecting motion, a door opening, a water leak, or an alarm sounding. When triggered, it flies along preprogrammed routes to a set location, where it can livestream and record what’s happening in the Ring app.
The drone can also run scheduled patrols around your home or be sent out on demand. It offers 2K resolution, a 148-degree field of view, and, because it’s mobile, it can cover 360 degrees. The Verge got some hands-on time with the new flying camera at the launch event.
Ring’s pitch here is that the Drone Cam can replace the need for multiple cameras in your home while still letting you see what’s happening anywhere in your home if there’s an incident.
It is designed for indoor use only, and the company claims it has built-in privacy: It records only while flying. The drone’s camera is shuttered when it’s docked, and it’s noisy as heck when it’s flying, so there’s no way it could sneak up and invade your privacy.
Footage from the Drone Cam is 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 still allowing cloud processing for features like smart alerts and AI-powered video search.
At the event, I saw the Drone Cam take flight and got some hands-on time with the device. It’s a completely different product from the Always Home Cam that was 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 integrated into its body, as opposed to dangling in the center.
Ring claims the Drone Cam can fly for five to eight minutes on a charge, and for every minute of flight time, it takes eight minutes of charging — that means a five-minute flight needs about 40 minutes of charging. This short flight time suggests the product is better suited to quick check-ins than continuous monitoring, and whether it can really replace multiple stationary cameras remains to be seen.
At this week’s demo, I saw it complete a 1-minute flight, taking off from its dock, hovering, then following 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 navigate smoothly with barely any wobble.
According to Ring, the Drone Cam can fly up stairs and uses LED spotlights to help it see in the dark and deter potential intruders — but Ring didn’t demo this. The drone apparently follows preplanned flight paths you set up in the Ring app and will go around any obstacles it encounters along those routes. However, I didn’t get to see it interact with obstacles or anything unexpected — I’m particularly curious how pets will react to it.
A long runway
Siminoff said Ring has been developing the drone since 2016 and has come close to shipping two different models over that time before landing on the current version. Siminoff explained that they struggled to pack all the technology needed for an autonomous drone to fly in 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 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 let the drone navigate autonomously around obstacles, while relying on preprogrammed routes. “Truly, it’s like an AI agent that’s controlling the robot,” said Siminoff. The downside is that it depends entirely on an internet connection, which is a potential failure point for a home security product; without Wi-Fi, all it can do is land.
The Drone Cam launches 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 preorder now, with shipping expected to begin on December 16th, 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 where sensors and other devices are located.
Although Siminoff seemed confident the drone will launch in January as planned, Ring says it is currently “in the process of obtaining FCC certification.” When asked about the FCC’s ban on foreign-made drones, Siminoff said Ring Drone Cam “does comply with” FCC regulations and noted it’s assembled in the US. It’s normal for new gadgets to go through this process, but drones now face extra scrutiny.
Ring ushered in a world of new privacy questions when its cameras first started entering people’s homes more than a decade ago. Over the past year, the company’s new technologies have sparked fears that it could enable a surveillance state. An AI-piloted drone that can map your home, fly from room to room, and relies on the cloud to operate will certainly raise new privacy questions when it hits the market next year.
Photos by Victoria Barrios / The Verge