Holidaymakers or office workers who wish to check from afar whether their hob is switched off, keys are still on the kitchen table or cat is sleeping on the sofa will be disappointed. Amazon’s Ring Always Home Cam, a mini-drone, cannot be manually controlled. It starts its patrol flights through the home only when disaster looms and only flies to where the user has programmed it. The autonomous security camera is connected to a series of sensors inside the home and is designed in a way so that it flies to predetermined areas in the user’s house if one of the sensors is triggered by a potential break-in.
In this case, an alarm goes off on the owner’s smartphone to let them follow the recordings live from a camera attached to a rod at the centre of the unit’s bottom side. If it is inactive, the drone parks itself in a cube-shaped dock, with the camera covered and not recording anything. By being able to move by itself, the home drone aims to relieve its owners of having to install multiple surveillance cameras all around the house. It can capture events in different rooms and from different angles. Should the intruders of the future first approach the drone with a butterfly net and try and catch it, that and their drone-catching skills will likely be able to be followed live from smartphones too.
