Ring has announced a (*possibly) new member within their camera lineup, focusing on the inside of your home. Not only is it focused on the inside, but the entire, inside.
The idea is that it is a drone and a camera combined which sleeps within its dock until it is needed. When a situation is detected using the Ring Alarm system, it will leave its dock and fly over to see what the situation is, recording everything in its path or allowing you to watch it all happen live from the app if you respond quick enough (else you’ll have to watch the saved video like any one of their cameras).
You train it to know where within the house you want to monitor and name out the sections of the house so it knows where to go (kind of sounds like a flying Roomba). So if an alarm is triggered within the master bedroom, it knows to take off and head into that direction to see what’s going on.
It can be triggered manually as well, in case you just want to randomly check in on things. While in its dock, it isn’t doing anything but charging and lying dormant until it is needed. It has built-in object detection to avoid crashing (like most nicer modern drones these days), so you won’t have to worry about it flying into a wall randomly like some kind of dodo bird (although it would make for a wonderful string of new YouTube videos).
So specs? The built-in camera will (could) be 1080p like the rest of their cameras. The drone will (could) feature cage-enclosed blades so it can’t hurt anything or itself (too badly at least). It will join the app with the rest of their products and allow everything to work together for the best alarm experience.
It is literally like having your own flying sentry robot to guard your house with. Actually, not like, but is. It really sounds like an interesting concept, although we wonder how many generations of it will exist until the technology is fully reliable.
The expected MSRP will be around $249, which makes it reasonable when comparing it to the rest of their lineup and for what it can do (which is an awesome move on their part). You won’t see it ship until (possibly) next year.
Finally, the reason we keep saying “possibly” throughout the story is that the product is not yet FCC-approved, which means it cannot legally go on sale until it is (approved). This doesn’t mean it won’t and we can only assume at this point that it has a strong chance of doing so. It’s just that the FCC has been pretty strict surrounding drone technology over the last year, and getting stricter as we move forward. Thankfully, since this will be used inside your own home and not rated to go outside, it will likely have a strong chance.
We just hope it won’t experience the same two-way audio issues as some of their other models–assuming it even has the ability for two-way audio/communication, as this feature isn’t listed anywhere (yet).
