Abstract:
Amazon-owned Ring is moving further into surveillance, launching an indoor drone for home monitoring and an autonomous robot designed to patrol businesses. The company announced its $250 Ring Drone Cam on Tuesday. It's a security camera that can fly from room to room, including upstairs, and capture footage during the day or night.
When alarms or sensors on windows, doors and home security devices are triggered, the book-sized drone flies along a preset path to investigate suspicious activity. Users can also deploy the drone at any time, the company said.
At a demonstration in New York on Monday, Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff said the drone could be used as a home surveillance tool and also act as a crime "deterrent" thanks to the device's built-in LED lights.
“If someone was wandering around your house at night and your Ring doorbell motion detector went off, imagine you saw a spotlight and something flying through the window,” Siminoff said. “You probably wouldn’t go into that house.”
The drone can fly for up to eight minutes at a time before automatically returning to its charging base. It has two plastic-wrapped propellers that make a loud buzzing sound when it's airborne.
Ring devices provide another avenue for Amazon to expand its presence in the smart home beyond its Echo smart speakers and Eero routers and expand in a market that Grand View Research estimates will top $200 billion in sales this year. This is also fertile ground for Amazon's rivals Apple and Google.
Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018, is best known for its doorbell products but has been plagued by privacy concerns, mainly due to its work with police. Earlier this year, Ring came under renewed scrutiny for a controversial Super Bowl ad promoting an AI pet-finding tool called "Search Party." It subsequently canceled its integration with police technology provider Flock Safety, which had also faced widespread backlash for its automatic license plate readers.
Ring first previewed this drone in 2020, when it was called Always Home Cam. Siminov said he chose to hold off on releasing the device until Amazon could perfect the design, sensors and data processing.
The company also launched the $1,000 Ring Rover Cam on Tuesday. The device repurposes Amazon's Astro home robot for companies to patrol offices, warehouses and other workplaces. Astro's lifespan as a commercial device was short-lived, with few upgrades since its debut in 2021.
Ring says it "borrowed the best parts of Astro" to create the Ring Rover Cam, describing it as a "robot built for security."
Similar to Astro, the device is a display mounted on a two-wheeled base with a retractable periscope camera. It also comes with a "built-in siren," two-way audio, and a "light pole" that shines light into the ceiling to help users track their location.
Drones and robots allow users to monitor multiple areas of a home or business with just one device, Siminov said in an interview.
“People like indoor cameras, but they don’t necessarily want them everywhere in their home,” Siminov said.
Privacy is the "default" mode for drones and robots, which flash their LED lights while recording, Ring said.
Siminov said the drone cannot be flown outdoors due to Federal Aviation Administration regulations, which restrict drone operations unless within the pilot's line of sight.
“We’ve told our customers not to do that because it’s illegal,” Siminov said. “We’ve put safeguards in there so it doesn’t fly outside.”
Ring stated that the Ring Drone Cam will be shipped in the United States on January 27, pending approval by the Federal Communications Commission; the Ring Rover Cam will begin shipping to users on December 16.
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