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About the Robotics Portal

What is the Robotics Portal?​

The DroneDeploy Robotics Portal is focused on helping teams scale their robotic operations.

We do this by providing a cloud platform and developer tooling for centralized management and operation of fleets of heterogeneous robots and sensors.

  • For Developers: Build unique robotic fleet solutions. The Robotics Automation Portal provides an off the shelf platform for secure programmatic interaction with robotics.
  • For Operations Teams: Monitor and troubleshoot issues with the fleet.
  • For Field Teams: Execute and coordinate multi-robot operations.

How does the Robotics Portal work?​

The Robotics Automation Portal is broken up into:

  1. On-robot Agent: A software agent that is installed directly on the robot.
  2. Backend: A set of cloud technology providing the core of the Robotics Automation Portals functions.
  3. Web Portal: A user interface to interact with the backend.
  4. SDK: A set of programmatic tools to interface with the Robotics Automation Portal backend via the cloud, or directly with the DroneDeploy agent on the robot over a local network connection.

Connectivity and Security​

The Robotics Automation Portal uses the agent to make a connection with the Backend Platform and keep a connection open. This means that the robots can change IP addresses or active network adapters at any time. This also means that traditional ports used for systems like ROSBridge or MAVLink Ground Control can be locked from any external access.

The DroneDeploy Agent is built on a plugin architecture which also means that specific plugins can isolate specific capability that developers may choose to exclude due to sensitive security requirements. For example, any plugin capable of remotely controlling a robot can be entirely excluded from installation if the team so wishes.