How will Always Home Cam work?

Consumer drones are known to be difficult to fly at first, before you learn what you are doing, and most likely you will crash it. It is not about if, but when.

So how about a drone that flies automatically, at home as a roaming security camera? One that the manufacturer promises will not crash into a ceiling fan or planter, because it has obstacle avoidance technology. And it returns to its crib when the flight is complete.

Sounds really good. But will it work?

Jamie Siminoff, the founder of the Amazon Ring subsidiary, insists that he will because there is an app for it. The $ 249 Always Home Cam, available for sale in 2021, will be operated through the Ring app, which will be configured to work with the drone based on room mapping.

“It will fly based on predetermined areas and angles that you have set,” he told us TODAY.

What you won’t do is fly manually, work outside, or fly from, say, the first floor of a house to the floor above, Siminoff says. It is one floor at a time.

The idea was to go beyond a static security camera, which he sells, and take people remotely on a tour of the house, to monitor, without having to connect multiple cameras. “So you can check anywhere in the house.”

Siminoff says he built this in response to multiple requests from people who, for example, left the window open and wanted to check, but had their interior camera facing the other direction.

“Rather than simply encouraging customers to buy more cameras and install them in more places around the house, how could we solve this problem with a single solution?” noted, on Ring’s blog. “We wanted to create a camera that could give users the flexibility of every point of view they want in the home, while meeting our fundamental principles of privacy and security.”

Siminoff started Ring in response to a request from his wife, who thought there should be a way to see who’s at the door, unopened, and be able to check the outside of the house remotely.

Sales of the video doorbell took off, helped by its frequent appearances on cable TV shopping channels promoting the product and, in 2018, Amazon called and offered to buy Ring for $ 1 billion.

Siminoff has been working on this drone concept for several years, prior to the acquisition, he says. Originally, the parts were so expensive that it would have cost $ 2,000 to retail. But with the rise of autonomous vehicle technology, parts have now reached the point where you could have a consumer product.

Ring addresses safety concerns by noting that the camera only turns on during flight. You can show people in real time what the camera sees, through the app, or record videos and store them in the cloud through Ring’s Cloud service, which costs $ 3 per month.

And if it did crash, say, on the head of someone who lived in the house, Siminoff says not to worry. “It’s a lightweight drone” and it wouldn’t hurt, he says.

But just in case, he says he built the drone to be especially loud in flight. “This is the privacy you can hear.”

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