UiPath Orchestrator is an out-of-the-box tool that allows you to orchestrate your robots (*hint* the clue is in the name 🙂 ). At a very high level it allows you to manage and monitor your suite of robots. However, before you can even begin creating, maintaining, deploying or monitoring processes, you need to know how to create and connect your robot with the orchestrator. Here’s exactly how you would go about doing that

For the avoidance of doubt, the robot itself runs on the host machine, the “Robot” you “Create” in orchestrator is merely a definition to allow processes to be created/maintained/deployed/monitored from the orchestrator. You can use a robot without orchestrator.

There are a number of steps that need to be taken when creating your first ever robot connection in orchestrator (note: not all of these steps are necessary every time you want to provision a new robot, hopefully that will be clear!):

1. Create an environment
2. Create a machine
3. Create a robot
4. Link your robot to an environment

Don’t worry – this isn’t complicated. The first think you will need to do is log into your orchestrator instance using your tenant information. You will be presented with your orchestrator dashboard as below:

Create an Environment

• On the left navigation pane, click on “Robots”
• Select “Environments” on the top navigation pane

• Click the “+” symbol to create a new environment
• Fill in the required information
• Click “create” (easy…. right?)

Create a Machine

• Click “Machines” on the left navigation pane
• Click the “+” symbol to create a new machine

A couple of options will be available at this stage. You will be able to create either a STANDARD OR A MACHINE TEMPLATE. For now, we will only focus on creating a standard machine.

• Click “Standard Machine”
• Fill in the required details
• Click “Provision”

IMPORTANT – The name of your machine should be the name of the machine in which your UiPath robot is installed. If you are building automations on your laptop and running them on your laptop then this is the name of your laptop. Here’s a useful link if you don’t know how your machine name: https://www.javelin-tech.com/blog/2020/03/how-to-find-computer-name-windows/

Creating a Robot

So, you’ve created an environment, you’ve created a machine for that environment, but you’ve not yet told orchestrator what your robot is!

• Click “Robots” in the left navigation pane
• Click the “+” symbol to create a robot

A couple of options will be available at this stage. You will be able to create either a STANDARD robot or a FLOATING robot. For now, we will only focus on creating a standard robot.

• Click “Standard Robot”

You will be presented with the below form (as before… although, this one needs a little bit more information).

The details you enter should be as below:

• Machine – Select the machine that you created earlier from the drop down list
• Name – Give your robot a sensible name
• Username – This is the username which you use to log onto the desktop where the robot is hosted (that’s your laptop in this case). If you are on a domain, both the domain and username are required. If you get stuck, use the whoami command on your command line!
• Password – This is the password which you use to log onto the desktop where the robot is hosted. this is an optional field and is not required for attended or development robots
• Type – This is the type of robot that you are creating. For now, I will select development (Note – the number of robots are limited in the community edition of UiPath)
• Description – A short description of your robot – this is useful if you have many robots

Afterwards, click “create” to create your robot. Your robot will now be created, although, you will notice that the robot does not have an environment, the robot will be unable to execute automations without being assigned.

Link Robot to an Environment

• Click “Robots” on the left navigation pane
• Click “Environments” on the top navigation pane
• Click “Manage” on the environment you created earlier
• Choose the robot you created to assign to the environment
• Click “Update”

You will now see that your robot is assigned and is ready to use! 🙂