Ring’s New $249.99 Drone Flies Room to Room When a Sensor Goes Off. It Ships in January.

If a window sensor trips while you’re at work, Ring wants a little drone to leave its charging dock, fly the hallway and show you what’s going on. The company, now part of Amazon, put a price on that idea Tuesday: $249.99, with U.S. shipments slated for Jan. 27, 2027.

The Ring Drone Cam is an indoor flying camera, not a backyard flyer, and it is meant to work with the doorbells, window sensors and alarms a lot of people already have on the wall. When one of those devices goes off, the drone is supposed to lift off on its own and head to a spot you picked in advance. You can also send it out from the Ring app, or put it on a schedule.

Ring also announced a second machine for shops and offices: the Ring Rover Cam, a rolling security robot priced at $999.99, due to start shipping in the U.S. on Dec. 16, 2026. Both sit under a new label, Ring Robotics, and both are steered by a system Ring calls AI Pilot, an SI that maps the rooms and flies or rolls the route.

It takes off when a sensor trips

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder, has been hearing the same question for years. “When people stop me on the street, it’s what they ask, ‘Where’s the drone?’” he told TechRadar.

In Amazon’s announcement, he put the pitch this way: “For years, customers told us they wanted eyes in the places a fixed camera couldn’t reach, and peace of mind in the spots they’d never want one. The honest answer wasn’t more cameras; it meant reimagining what a security device could be.” A camera in every room is expensive, and in some rooms it’s a hard sell. A drone that stays docked until something happens is Ring’s answer.

The hardware is small. The Verge, which got hands-on time at a launch event in New York this week, put the flying weight at 165 grams, about as light as a small phone. Ring’s product page lists 2K video, a 148-degree field of view that can swing a full circle, and two LED lights that come on in the dark. It is rated for indoor use only, in rooms between 41 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. You carry it through the house once so the SI can build a floor plan and suggest patrol points, such as a side door or a long hall. After that, the system plots a route and is supposed to go around furniture on the way.

It will not be aloft for long. Ring says a charge lasts about five to eight minutes in the air, and The Verge reported that every minute of flight takes about eight minutes of charging, so a five-minute hop would need roughly 40 minutes back on the dock. That makes it a check-in tool, not a guard that hovers all afternoon. Because the brains sit in the cloud, the drone needs Wi-Fi to navigate. If the internet drops, Siminoff said, it lands.

It is also loud, on purpose. “It’s loud — we think that’s a feature. This thing is not gonna sneak up on you,” Siminoff told TechRadar. The propellers are caged, the dock covers the camera when the drone is home, and Ring says recording stops the moment it settles back in. Scheduled patrols and video history require a Ring Protect plan.

“Truly, it’s like an AI agent that’s controlling the robot,” Siminoff told The Verge. That is the tradeoff in plain English. The flying camera is light because most of the thinking happens off the device. The SI is doing the flying.

They built it twice and left it in the boxes

This is not Ring’s first try. Siminoff said work started in 2016, before Amazon bought the company. A version was boxed and ready in 2021. “They were in boxes and ready to go,” he told TechRadar. It never went out to customers. Another attempt in 2025 didn’t ship either. The earlier Always Home Cam was a bigger, heavier machine; The Verge says this new one is about a quarter the size of the model it saw at CES in 2023.

Ring had packed too many sensors onto the aircraft, which made it heavier and hungrier for power. About a year ago the team started over, building a simpler flyer that knows how to take off, land and stay on Wi-Fi, and letting the SI in the cloud do the rest. “That kind of invention is hard, and it takes time. But we kept at it until we got it right,” Siminoff said in the Amazon post.

One hurdle is still open. Amazon’s announcement carries a legal line that matters if you want one for the house: the Drone Cam “has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission” and may not be sold until that authorization comes through. The Verge reported Ring is getting that certification. Asked about rules on foreign-made drones, Siminoff said the Drone Cam “does comply with” FCC regulations and is assembled in the United States. The January date is the company’s target, not a stamp from Washington.

A $999.99 rover for after closing time

The Rover Cam is the machine you can actually order now. Ring’s own post says it can cover up to 5,000 square feet, map a space on its own and run custom patrol routes. It is built for businesses, not living rooms.

Ring says the idea started with people who owned Amazon’s Astro home robot, which Amazon later discontinued, and who liked the roving-security part most. The company says it kept the best of Astro and rebuilt it as a security machine: a periscope camera that rises over counters, 4K video while it rolls, two-way talk, a siren and a light tower. TechRadar, which watched it patrol a mock stockroom, said the camera mast extends to about four feet and a patrol can run about 30 minutes. If a connected sensor trips at 2 a.m., the rover is supposed to roll to the programmed spots and send the feed to a phone.

For now, both machines are a U.S. story. Ring has been telling people on 𝕏 that the Drone Cam is not sold outside the United States, and the product page says it does not ship to Canada. The rover is first in line, in December, at $999.99. The flying camera, if the FCC finishes its paperwork, is the $249.99 one due in January. After a decade of asking Siminoff where the drone was, customers will get a chance to see whether this one actually leaves the box.