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Ring’s new drone patrols your home to keep an eye on things – even upstairs
Alongside the Ring Drone Cam, Ring introduced the Rover Cam for businesses. It investigates disturbances and streams 4K footage.
Today, Ring announced the launch of a new subbrand, Ring Robotics, with two new products: the $249 Ring Drone Cam, an indoor “mobile security camera” drone that shoots 2K video, and the $999 Ring Rover Cam, a security robot for businesses that patrols autonomously and investigates disturbances.
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Both devices use Ring’s custom navigation software, “AI Pilot,” to autonomously navigate interior spaces and move between set points along a patrol, rather than being controlled directly by the user. AI Pilot leverages the devices’ cameras, sensors, and vision models, along with cloud processing, to create interior maps, then move the devices between predesignated patrol points such as a side door or a window.
I recently saw both new robots in person at a showcase in New York hosted by Ring’s founder and chief inventor, Jamie Siminoff. They certainly do what they advertise but come with some significant limitations. The drone, for example, can only stay in the air for about 8 minutes before it needs to dock and recharge, while the Ring Rover Cam is slow and deliberate, seemingly ideal for routine surveillance rather than rapid response to an event.
The Ring Drone Cam moves around predetermined patrol points in your home, sending you a live 2K video feed whether you’re just in another room or out of town. The user doesn’t actually fly the drone; instead, it moves around autonomously using Ring’s custom “AI Pilot” navigation technology, leveraging its cameras, sensors, and cloud processing to create a map of its surroundings. This allows it to fly through the air at an appropriate height, going from room to room, even up stairs.
In the Ring app, the user creates patrol points they want the drone to move between — likely a window, doorway, or high-traffic room — creating a set path that is both predictable (so you always know where the drone will go) and relevant, so it’s only monitoring the areas you want it to. But here is where its limitations come into play: It needs a finite path to navigate because its flight time is limited to just five to eight minutes in the air before it has to return to its charging dock.
That makes the dock both the start and end point for the drone’s routine trips, and it’s designed with this in mind. When it goes to land, the drone hovers over the dock and lowers itself down, dropping into place so it can start charging automatically. I asked about its potential to land elsewhere, and Ring told me it would only make an emergency landing outside of its dock in case it didn’t have enough power to get home.
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There’s one other very important caveat: This thing is loud. There’s no sneaking up on anyone with the Ring Drone Cam, as the entire household is likely to hear it the second it undocks. The four propellers emit a constant, high-pitched whirring while in the air that’s loud enough to announce its presence to anyone in the vicinity: intruder or resident.