Fleet Management
The Viam app provides fleet management allowing you to work on any number of robots alone or in collaboration with others.
Work with groups of robots
With Viam, you can organize robots into locations and organizations.
For example, you may have separate organizations for your robots at home and at work:
Inside an organization, you can organize robots into one or more locations:
If you are managing a fleet, you can use fragments when configuring your robots, allowing you to use the same configuration for multiple robots.
Use Viam for collaboration
To facilitate collaboration, you can add collaborators to organizations, assign permissions to collaborators, and share locations across multiple organizations.
When you create a Viam account, Viam automatically creates an organization for you. You can use this organization as your collaboration hub by inviting collaborators to your organization. You can also add additional organizations as desired at any time.
Caution
Everyone you invite as an owner to your organization has complete access to everything in that organization. This includes the permissions to delete robots and locations, as well as the ability to remove you from the organization.
You can also share locations across different organizations that you are part of.
Permissions
Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is a way to enforce security in the Viam app by assigning organization members roles that confer permissions. Permissions are added at the organization level and apply to everything in an org.
- Owner: Can see and edit every tab on the robot page. Can manage users in the app.
- Operator: Can see and use only the remote control tab. Cannot see or edit the Setup, Config, History, Logs, Code Sample, or Security tabs.
To view the roles each organization member has, click on the organization drop down in the top navigation bar and click on Settings.
If you have the Owner role, you can invite new users and change the roles assigned to organization members using the role drop down for the respective user.
Collaborate on your robots
Viam is built in a way that allows you to change configurations, deploy packages, check logs, and control your robots both when you are close to your robot, as well as remotely.
Robot configuration and robot code is intentionally kept separate, allowing you to keep track of versioning and debug issues separately.
Configuration
Everyone who has access to the location the robot is in, can change the robot’s configuration. When you or your collaborators change a robot’s configuration, the robot will automatically reconfigure itself within 15 seconds. You can see configuration changes made by yourself or by your collaborators on the History tab. You can also revert to an earlier configuration from the History tab.
Note
For some configuration aspects you may require physical access to the robot so you can see how components are connected.
Package Deployment
Coming soon.
You and your collaborators can deploy control logic, modular resources, sidecar processes, or machine learning models to your fleet of robots without manually copying files by uploading it to Viam’s cloud and deploying it to your fleet.
Remote control
Everyone who has access to the robot can remotely control it using the Control tab. This allows you to visually test and remotely operate robot components and services
Control with code
Everyone who has access to the robot’s location can obtain the robot address and secret needed to send API calls to the robot. You can also share the robot address and location secret without granting location access in the Viam app.
With the robot address and the location secret, you can write code, collaborate on your code using tools like GitHub, and run your code to control the robot from anywhere in the world.
Caution
Be cautious when sharing location secret keys in your code or messages.
Do not make a secret key publicly available, as anyone who has the secret key can access your location, compromising the security of your system.
It is good practice to note where and when you share a location secret key.
Logs
Each robot automatically sends logs to the cloud where you can view them from the Logs tab. If you are collaborating on a robot and controlling it using the Control tab or code, everyone who has access to the location the robot is in, can see the robot’s logs.
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