Amazon's Ring will sell the $250 Ring Drone Cam, an indoor flying security camera, from late January, more than six years after first announcing it. It also launched the $1,000 Rover Cam, a rebranded Astro robot, shipping in mid-December.

Amazon's Ring will start selling its flying home security camera in late January, more than six years after it first announced the drone, Bloomberg reported. The Ring Drone Cam costs $250 and flies only indoors.

Ring scrapped two earlier versions. Adding sensors and computing power needed a bigger battery, which made the drone heavier and less stable, said Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, now an Amazon vice president.

“You basically keep fixing things that then break things and make them worse,” he said.

The fix was to move most of the work to AI in the cloud. The drone can take off and land on its own, but it needs Wi-Fi for almost everything else, from planning its route to checking alerts from other Ring devices.

It weighs about 165 grams, records 2K video and flies for five to eight minutes before returning to its base. Each minute of flight takes about eight minutes of charging. Software stops it from flying outdoors, where it would break US aviation rules.

Ring also unveiled the $1,000 Rover Cam, a rebranded version of Amazon's Astro robot, which sold for up to $2,350 and never caught on. It ships in mid-December and is aimed mainly at businesses, 9to5Google reported.

The drone's camera switches off when it is docked, and Ring says videos from both devices are encrypted by default. Ring is already being sued over its facial recognition feature. Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly working on its own $1,000 home robot.

“It's very easy to fall into the toys business when you get into robotics,” Siminoff said. “We don't have any interest in doing that.”