Workers and connections
Unattended Workers
Robocorp unattended worker is a term for different ways of deploying software robots in remote locations. There are two ways of deploying software robots:
- on a self-hosted installation on a local computer, server, or virtualized platforms, or
- in a Cloud hosted container unattended worker
Robocorp Setup Utility
The self-hosted installation of the Robocorp Unattended Workers is done using an application called Robocorp Setup Utility. It links a computer to Control Room Workspace and enables Control Room to deploy and operate software robots on the computer securely.
Self-hosted installations are suitable for all kinds of different use cases where the user manages the running environment, e.g., on-premise servers, virtual machines, or user-hosted containers. Self-hosted installation is required for automations that require access to the local resources and systems that are not accessible from the Internet.
Robocorp-Hosted Cloud Worker
Control Room offers a managed version of a Robocorp-Hosted Cloud Worker, which is launched on-demand in the cloud when robot execution starts. Under the hood, there is a Docker container that runs the Worker and executes one robot.
No local state is maintained between robot runs because a fresh container is used for each run. Currently, one Linux-based container option is available, providing a way to execute robots with no hardware setups.
The container unattended workers operate on hardened and isolated server instances.
What data is sent from the Robocorp unattended worker to Control Room?
For the Control Room unattended worker to operate in a Control Room Workspace, the only mandatory communication needed is workload-agnostic control data. Control data includes commands from the cloud and generic status information towards the cloud. By default, also standard output and error streams are delivered to Control Room for convenience.
Additionally, Control Room provides several opt-in services for typical robotic process automation (RPA) use cases.
The software robot developer has full control over what happens to other data being accessed during the robot execution. The software robot developer can choose not to send sensitive data to Control Room in work item payloads and artifacts.
How are artifacts stored and transferred from Robocorp unattended worker to Robocorp Control Room?
Artifact storage is backed by Amazon S3, and data is encrypted at rest using AWS-provided methods. Artifacts are transferred securely over HTTPS using short-lived S3 pre-signed requests. You may consider implementing application-level encryption as an additional security measure; however, Robocorp does not currently include any specific tooling for this purpose.
Assistants (attended robots)
The unattended worker concept serves the unattended robot use cases where Control Room handles the triggering. The end-user always triggers the Assistants.