Running your robot in Control Room

Now that our robot is done, what used to take Maria hours each week now happens in a matter of seconds!

There is still one detail, though: Maria would need to install VS Code, download our robot code, run the robot manually... It beats copying and pasting data for hours each week for sure, but we can make life even easier for her: it would be great if the robot could run automatically in the cloud, for example, every Friday at noon. How can we do it?

By using Control Room, of course!

A factory in the cloud

Think about an old school car factory: you have various assembly lines, which are set up so that a series of operations are performed on the car that moves down them. Control Room works the same way. You set up an assembly line (the Process), and you can add to it multiple operations (the Steps) that are performed on whatever you are working on.

Our robot is really simple for now, and it fits all in one step, but in the future, we could add more, or we could decide to split the robot into multiple steps, and Control Room supports that easily.

Control Room is very powerful and can support very complicated workflows. What we see here is the easiest possible scenario. Beginners' course, remember? 😀

To set this all up, we will have to go through these steps:

• Logging into Control Room
• Creating a new Organization for RobotSpareBin Industries
• Creating a new Workspace
• Creating a new Robot
• Uploading the robot code
• Creating a Process (the "assembly line", remember?)
• Adding the Step to the Process and setting it up
• Executing and scheduling the process.

Still with us? Great!

Logging into Control Room

Log in with your Robocorp account.

Creating a new organization and a workspace

Organizations allow you to group users, workspaces, processes, assistants, and robots. You are sure that this robot will only be the first of a long list, so you decide to create an organization for RobotSpareBin Industries!

On the Control Room homepage, click on the Create a New Organization button.

Use RobotSpareBin Industries as the organization name.

Inside the new organization, we need to create a workspace. A common use case is to create a workspace for the production environment and one or more for development and staging environments. We will only create the Production workspace for now.

Uploading the robot code to Control Room

First, make sure your VS Code is linked to your Robocorp account.

Ok! We have the robot on our computer. It's time to send it soaring into the cloud by uploading the robot code.

• Open the Command Palette (macOS: Shift-Command-P, Windows: Ctrl+Shift+P).
• Type upload robot, select Robocorp: Upload Robot to the Control Room, and press Enter.
• Select Create new Robot.
• Type Sales Data Robot as the robot name and press Enter.
• You should eventually see a success message at the bottom of the VS Code screen.

Whew! That's our robot setup taken care of. Let's move to the Process!

Creating a new process

Click the Home icon in the vertical toolbar on the left side of Control Room screen.

Select the Production workspace under the RobotSpareBin Industries organization.

Click the Create Your First Process button to create a new process.

Let's give it an evocative name, like Maria's weekly copy paste marathon.

A Configure Process panel opens.

Adding the robot step to the Process

Think of all the robots you will add in Control Room as your "robot fleet in the garage": you have them safe there, and they are available when needed in your processes.

Next, we want to associate our robot to our process, and select a runtime environment for it:

Under the Steps section, from the Add Robot dropdown, select Sales Data Robot > Run all tasks.

Sales Data Robot is the robot's name, and Run all tasks is the name of the task to run. The tasks name is defined in the robot.yaml configuration file in your robot project.

Leave the Environment selection as Cloud Environment.

Click the Add step button.

Close the Configure Process panel by clicking the X icon on the top right of the panel.

Wait, what is a runtime environment? 🤔

Each time you ran the robot during development, you were running the robot on your local computer. When using Control Room, the robot can be executed in different ways. The easiest way is to run the robot in a "cloud environment", something we can call a "virtual machine".

It's not really a virtual machine. It's a Docker container. There's a difference, you want to know? (You nerd! 🤓)

For now, it's enough for you to know that in Control Room, all robots need a runtime environment to run, and the easiest way is to use a cloud environment so that everything happens in the cloud.

This is not the only option: you also have the possibility of having your computer (or Maria's) running the robot locally, but triggered by Control Room. That is the job of Robocorp Workforce Agent.

Whew! That was a lot of clicking! But now the fun starts!

Running the process

All is set now for our robot to run in the cloud!

Click on the Run... button at the top. The robot starts running! At the bottom of the screen, you see a new process run doing its thing. Eventually, the state of the run should change to Completed. Hurray!

Great! The robot is now happily running in the cloud!

Viewing the results

When the robot has finished running, we can look at the details of how the process worked out.

Click on the Run #1 link. You will see some high-level information regarding the process run.

Click on the step run row at the bottom of the screen. You will be taken to step run details. On the right, there's a Run artifacts section. You should see sales_results.pdf and sales_summary.png listed there! You can click to open those files.

Scheduling the process

We have already done so much to improve Maria's life. But right now, she would need to log into Control Room herself and push the Start button. Or, even worse, call you every Friday at 12 to press the button, and that's no way to live your life! 😀

Instead, now that the robot is configured to run in Control Room, we can schedule it to run automatically!

On the details page for our Process, we will find the Schedule section and set it up like this:

Now Control Room starts our robot exactly at 12 every Friday.

Maria is off the hook completely, and she can do more exciting stuff at RobotSpareBin. Maybe she will get a promotion; after all, optimizing this was her idea!

Other options for running the robot

Running the robot on your local machine with Visual Studio Code, or RCC, or in Control Room are not the only options.

If your robot needs to be run on a physical (or a virtual) machine to access, for example, desktop applications, you can use our applications to that:

• Use Robocorp Workforce Agent for unattended cases where the robot can work in the background without human intervention.
• Use Robot Assistants for attended cases where the robot can work together with humans to complete automated tasks!

Remember that running mission-critical robots just on the developer's computer is not recommended! 😅

What we learned

A lot!

• You can run robots in Control Room with the push of a button!
• You need to upload your robot's code to Control Room.
• You need to create a Process to run your robots.
• A robot step can be run in multiple processes.
• You need to select a runtime environment for your robot step when you add it to a process.
• A "runtime environment" is the actual computer that will execute the robot: it can be a Docker container in the cloud or a physical machine running the Robocorp Workforce Agent.
• You can schedule your processes in Control Room to run at specific intervals automatically.
• Robocorp Workforce Agent can be used to run your robots on any machine.
• Robot Assistants can work together with humans to complete automated tasks.