Ring Launches Robotics Arm With $270 Drone and $1,000 Rover

Amazon's Ring is selling a drone that flies around inside your house. The company announced Ring Robotics on Tuesday, TechCrunch reported, debuting two devices built on a proprietary stack it calls AI Pilot. The $270 Ring Drone Cam, a 2K indoor patrol drone, ships January 27. The $1,000 Ring Rover Cam, a 4K rolling robot aimed at businesses, ships December 16.

Ring says AI Pilot uses "specialized vision models, sensors, and cloud processing" that let the devices "see, think, and navigate autonomously," building floor-plan schematics as they go. Video is protected by what the company calls TAKE, or Throw Away the Key Encryption, which it describes as its "strongest default encryption yet."

The Rover's lineage is awkward. Amazon's Astro, per TechCrunch, was "first announced as a kind of nebulous domestic helper before being repurposed as an enterprise security product," and Amazon "put the device out to pasture" in 2024 after roughly seven months in that pivot. Ring says the new robot drew on "feedback from Amazon Astro customers." Whether it reuses Astro hardware, the announcement does not say.

The tension underneath is what mobile cameras will see and who will get to look. Critics have long described Ring's doorbell business as creating "unofficial surveillance networks" that "police departments can (and routinely do) tap into." The company is now extending that camera presence inside the home, into the air and across workplace floors, under the same corporate roof.

This is the second robotics move Amazon has made in two weeks, after it stood up a personal robotics group around Fauna's Sprout earlier this month.