Robots

Orchestrator ensures the centralized management and delivery of automation resources (assets, queues, package versions, storage buckets, etc) to robots for execution.

The Assistant works as a user's sidekick in executing processes, allowing the attending user to manage and run automations with a few clicks. From a technical standpoint, the Assistant is the client of the user-mode Robot service, which is the brain behind all operations performed during automation execution.

The User Mode Robot is best suited in attended automation scenarios as it runs under the user that starts it and has the exact rights as that particular user.

By default, the start of the Robot Service is triggered by user sign-in when the service is set to run at login time. If it's not set to run at login time, opening the UiPath Assistant starts it automatically.

To perform attended operations, the user under which the robot runs must be assigned a license that provides that user rights to use the Attended Robot or you can license the Robot locally from the Command Line. Check out the UiPath Licensing Portal for more information about available SKUs.

Robots run under certain accounts - user or robot accounts - meaning robots run in the context of the corresponding identities. Those identities and their association with roles allow for a certain level of access to resources in Orchestrator.

To provide an attended robot with access to the resources in a folder, an administrator must add the underlying account to that folder. The account must also be granted the permissions to perform the operations required by the processes contained in that folder, or at least, by the processes they will execute - if, for instance, some processes only run under a specific account.

Orchestrator is the central hub for unattended automation as it allows launching unattended execution on the spot or by setting it up in a preplanned manner with triggers. It also manages the resources to be used in automation projects and consumed by robots, and access to them through support for hierarchical structuring combined with fine-grained role assignment.

Orchestrator can also distribute the workload to unattended robots, and when allowed to distribute the workload dynamically (with no constraints), can maximize efficiency and optimize robot usage.

UiPath Assistant is used to assist users with attended automations. In unattended scenarios, the Assistant is used solely for debugging purposes, when a user logs in to the unattended machine to look for and fix potential issues. In other words, unattended robots can be used in attended mode in a production environment for logging/testing/debugging purposes.

The Service Mode Robot is best suited in unattended automation scenarios and large-scale platform deployments. When a process is executed, the Robot Executor runs with the same rights as the user under which it is registered.

The Robot Service is the brain behind all operations performed during execution, and for unattended execution is launched under the Local System. It can open interactive Windows sessions and has all the rights of a machine administrator. As such, it enables automatic session management (such as log on and log off) for unattended jobs.

The Service Mode Robot gets installed for all users on a machine. When the Service Mode Robot is installed on Windows Server machines, you can run concurrent unattended jobs with automatic session management. This represents the seamless unattended automation scenario. You can have concurrent jobs with the User Mode Robot on a Windows Server, but no automatic session management.

Learn more about high-density robots in the Robot guide.

Learn how to set up Windows Server for HD Robots.

For unattended robots, licensing is performed per allocated runtime (slot) entity instead of per user. That's why Unattended, NonProduction, Testing runtimes are assigned at the machine object level.

Say you have a machine template defined with 10 unattended runtimes. For each workstation connected using the key generated by that template, a pool of 10 licenses is reserved from the total number of licenses at the tenant level. A runtime is only consumed from the pool of reserved licenses during job execution. If you connect 4 machines to Orchestrator using that template, you need 40 unattended runtime licenses at the tenant level. With 25 jobs running, there are still 15 slots available for execution.

Robots run under certain accounts - user or robot accounts - meaning robots run in the context of the corresponding identities. Those identities and their association with roles allow for a certain level of access to resources in Orchestrator.

To provide an unattended robot with access to the resources in a folder, an administrator must add the underlying account to that folder. The account must also be granted the permissions to perform the operations required by the processes contained in that folder, or at least, by the processes they will execute - if, for instance, some processes only run under a specific account. Additionally, a machine template with enough runtimes must be assigned to the folder. This operation allows you to specify the infrastructure (host machines) that can be used for executing automations in those folders and ensures they have slots available for execution.

A. With credentials

Since unattended automation implies the lack of a human agent, unattended robots often need to be provided with the credentials to log in to the host machine, such as for automation projects that interact with the user interface. UiPath supports several credential types: