Ring has announced two machines for its security line: an indoor drone for homes and a wheeled robot that patrols businesses. The robot is due to ship in the United States on December 16, 2026, and the drone on January 27, 2027, but the drone still needs approval from the US radio regulator before it can be sold. Both run on a system Ring calls AI Pilot, which uses cloud processing to navigate.
The drone got cheap by giving up its own brain
An earlier version of this drone tried to do the thinking on board, and it never reached customers. The version Ring plans to ship works more like a phone's voice assistant: the phone listens, but the understanding happens on a server. You carry the drone through your home once and it builds a floor plan. After that, when a motion or leak sensor goes off, the drone's cameras send video to Ring's servers, the servers work out a route to that spot on the floor plan, and the drone follows it. You can also tap a spot on a map in the app and it goes there.
So the cost has moved. The $250 buys a light machine, and the rest is your Wi-Fi and a Ring Protect plan, which Ring requires. If the connection drops, the drone is designed to land at once.
A camera that arrives where the problem is
Picture a family away for the weekend. A leak sensor under the kitchen sink goes off at night. Without the drone, that is a notification and a guess: is it a drip or a flood, and is it worth calling a neighbour at 2 a.m.? With the drone, it flies to the sensor and shows you the floor. A puddle by the sink and a burst pipe look very different on a phone, and you can decide what to do before anyone gets in a car.
It has limits that decide how you use it. A flight lasts about eight minutes, and eight minutes of charging buys one minute of flight, so a full flight takes over an hour to refill. It answers events; it does not watch all night. It is also loud on purpose, so everyone in the house knows when it is flying.
The business robot shows the same price drop
The patrol robot has a history too. Amazon launched a business version of its Astro robot in November 2023, starting at $2,350, and wound it down within a year. The Rover Cam looks nearly the same and costs $999.99, less than half as much. It can patrol a route on a schedule, drive to a disturbance, sound a siren, and let you speak through it to whoever is there.
Take a small warehouse that pays a guard $20 an hour for a ten-hour night. That is $200 a night, so the robot costs about as much as five nights, before the monthly plan. It will not replace the person who decides what to do about an intruder. It can take over the walk-round and the "was that noise anything?" check, and the guard or the owner looks at the video instead of walking the aisles.
Cheap robots built this way carry a risk. Astro for Business owners were told their robots would stop working on September 25, 2024, and were offered refunds. A robot whose thinking lives on a server lasts only as long as the maker keeps the service running. Before buying one, ask what it does when the Wi-Fi drops, and what happens to it if the maker retires the product.