Context: DevOps practices are increasingly adopted in the development and maintenance of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to improve deployment speed and operational reliability. However, compared to traditional software systems, CPS introduce additional complexity due to the tight coupling between software, hardware, and physical processes. This tight integration makes CPS particularly susceptible to different forms of drift over time, such as model drift and environment drift, which may affect system behavior, reliability, and operational performance. Although prior work has examined drift in general software systems and DevOps challenges more broadly, there is still limited empirical understanding of how drift manifests and is managed in DevOps-enabled CPS environments. Objective: The study proposed in this registered report aims to explore and characterize the types of drift that occur in CPS DevOps environments and to understand how practitioners experience and respond to them in practice. Method: We propose a multi-industry mixed-method research design, combining a exploratory literature review, practitioner workshop, and a large-scale survey. First, we derive a preliminary taxonomy of drift types from the literature. Second, we refine and extend this taxonomy through a qualitative analysis of workshop data with CPS practitioners across multiple domains. Finally, we evaluate and quantify the identified drift types and associated challenges through a survey study. The expected contributions of the proposed study are twofold: (1) a layered taxonomy of drift types in CPS DevOps, and (2) empirical insights into how drift manifests across CPS environments, including associated challenges, impacts, detection practices, and mitigation strategies used by practitioners.