Fleet Management
Viam’s fleet management system allows engineers to configure, control, debug, and manage their robots from the cloud at https://app.viam.com.
Once you create an account, you can configure your first robot, connect your robot to the cloud, see the logs, control it, update the configuration, and then start bringing your robot to life.
All communication happens securely over HTTPS using secret tokens that are in the robot’s configuration.
Tip
For a walkthrough of app.viam.com, check out our guide on how to use the Viam app.
Robot Hierarchy
Whether you have one robot, or millions, you can manage them with Viam. You organize your robots into organizations and locations.
Organization
An organization is the highest level grouping. It typical would be a company, or other institution, but could also be an individual or department depending on your needs.
Users in Viam, as defined by an email address, can be a member of multiple organizations.
A member of an organization can invite new users to that organization or create additional organizations.
For example, if you have personal robots at home, and also robots at school, you would belong to two organizations to keep those use cases separate.
Locations
All robots live inside of locations, which live within organizations. Locations allow organizations to organize and manage their fleets. Organizations often contain several locations.
For example, Cool Robot Inc, which is one organization, may have three warehouses (in NYC, LA, and Chicago). Cool Robot Inc could organize its robots into three locations based on their physical presence in a given warehouse. Another option would be to organize robots into locations with names such as “Production” and “Testing”–locations do not have to correspond with physical locations.
Configuration/logging
When a robot part first comes online, it requests its configuration from the Viam app (https://app.viam.com).
Once the robot has a configuration, it caches it locally and can use the configuration for up to 60 days.
The robot checks for new configurations every 15 seconds and will reconfigure itself automatically if needed.
Logs are automatically sent to the cloud so you can view them easily.
Remote control
If the user uses remote control in the Viam app (https://app.viam.com) UI, then all communication to the robot uses WebRTC.
Local communication between parts can be done over gRPC or WebRTC.