Flying Drone Home Awareness System by Sunflower Labs

From delivering pizzas to cooking steaks, drones have been entrusted with some of our most sacred tasks of late.

Enlisting them to protect our homes? The next logical step.

You can thank Sunflower Labs and their new Home Awareness System, a “smart” security network that pairs lights with a flying camera drone.

Once the sensor-packed lights are installed around a home, they detect motion, vibrations and noises and send an alert to the homeowner if they notice any activity. The owner then has the option to dismiss the alert or send the camera-equipped quadcopter to investigate the area.

Once an owner chooses to dispatch the autonomous drone, he/she can watch live footage from their mobile device and determine if further action is needed.

The lights are solar-powered, so they don’t require a lot of energy to provide around-the-clock protection, and are also able to learn a home’s normal activity patterns to avoid false alarms.

Sunflower— which raised $2.1 million in seed funding and is taking pre-orders for the system on its website — is charging $159 per light and $799 per drone with plans to ship units in 2017.

“The current systems for monitoring your whole property do not enhance your enjoyment of your home as much as they make you paranoid,” Sunflower backer Phil Libin told TechCrunch. “By tying together really smart sensors, drones, and artificial intelligence you can have a house that looks out for itself and gives you more awareness as to what’s going on.”

And they’re a lot cheaper to take care of than a rottweiler.

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Evan Bleier

Evan is a senior editor with InsideHook who earned a master’s degree in journalism from NYU and has called Brooklyn home since 2006. A fan of Boston sports, Nashville hot chicken and Kentucky bourbon, Evan has had his work published in publications including “Maxim,” Bleacher Report and “The Daily Mail.”