Design Considerations

A robot runs on an environment, which is a computer or virtual machine (VM) on which the robot agent is installed. When determining where to place the environment, consider the requirements for the robot's interaction.

Type of robot interaction	Location for the environment
Interact with a publicly available website	Ensure that the robot's environments are within a network that can interact with a publicly available web application.
Interact with an internal web application that is within a firewall and VPN	Ensure that the robot's environments are within the VPN so that they have access to the internal web application. The environment must be able to access the public internet the first time that you start the robot agent. The robot agent requires this access to download its required dependencies. Therefore, you might need to temporarily disable VPN access on the environment the first time you start the robot agent.

Type of robot interaction

Location for the environment

Interact with a publicly available website

Ensure that the robot's environments are within a network that can interact with a publicly available web application.

Interact with an internal web application that is within a firewall and VPN

Ensure that the robot's environments are within the VPN so that they have access to the internal web application.

The environment must be able to access the public internet the first time that you start the robot agent. The robot agent requires this access to download its required dependencies. Therefore, you might need to temporarily disable VPN access on the environment the first time you start the robot agent.