Users can't manually control the drone but can also set up custom flight routes and patrol schedules. It can automatically respond to alerts from security sensors you may have set up in the home, like motion, door, or window sensors. It will not leave your home, as it needs a Wi-Fi network to operate and uses the Alexa Home Map you may have created with existing Echo devices to help it navigate. It can fly five to eight minutes per charge. (The final production model will be black, not white like in the photos.)

“There are times when you do want to just be able to see everywhere around the home, but you don't necessarily want a [fixed] camera," Siminoff says. “That's why we invented Ring Robotics.”

Because it doesn't work outdoors and since it's well below the 250-gram threshold, the Drone Cam doesn't need to be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. Drones have also struggled in the US after the Federal Communications Commission banned DJI from importing foreign-made drones without certification. But Siminoff says the Drone Cam complies with all US regulations and is assembled in Texas.

But what if a bad actor gets access to the Drone Cam? Siminoff points to the company's TAKE technology, or Throw Away the Key Encryption. It encrypts video in transit and rotates keys every few minutes, but Ring temporarily holds the key to run cloud-based AI features before deleting its copy. That brief server-side access window makes it less foolproof than true end-to-end encryption. (Every Ring account requires two-factor authentication to log in.)