Learn how to go from managing one robot to hundreds on the Viam platform. After reading, you’ll understand how Viam supports you in moving from prototype to production, managing your machines remotely, and building viable robotics products. This is a great place to start if you want to understand how to scale and productize robotic systems on Viam. If you’re ready to get started, visit the Viam Docs.
Moving from prototype to production typically means rewriting your stack. You need deployment automation, fleet management tools, monitoring dashboards, and customer infrastructure. Most teams spend months building these systems before they can ship.
Viam's deployment and fleet management capabilities scale from one machine to hundreds without rewrites or custom infrastructure. Your prototype configuration becomes your production configuration.
Scale from prototype to production fleet
With Viam, your prototype configuration becomes your production configuration. Turn a working machine setup into a fragment and apply it to several, dozens, or even hundreds of machines. No deployment scripts, no copying files, no per-machine setup.
Once your machine works, export the configuration as a fragment to create a reusable setup from your prototype. New machines running viam-server pull their configuration from the cloud on first boot—specify a fragment and they start running immediately for automatic provisioning.
If some machines have a different camera model or site-specific parameter value, you can override for just those machines without forking the base fragment.
viam-server on each machine provides the same runtime guarantees everywhere: it starts components, services, and modules on boot, monitors them, and restarts on failure—all based on your shared fragment.
Once your fleet is deployed, the work shifts from provisioning machines to keeping them running, updated, and configured correctly over time.
Fleet management and maintenance
Deployment is one thing. Maintaining a production fleet is another. When you're managing dozens or hundreds of machines, you need automation for the tasks that would otherwise require manual work.
Production fleets need ongoing care. Viam handles the maintenance tasks that would otherwise require logging into individual machines.
When you change a fragment, every machine using it pulls the update for fleet-wide configuration updates—no scripting, no SSH loops.
You can schedule jobs without a scheduler by running tasks at specified intervals—periodic sensor readings, daily camera captures, calibration routines, health checks—without writing cron jobs or custom schedulers.
Roll out changes incrementally by deploying configuration changes, module versions, or machine learning (ML) models to a subset of machines first, then validate before rolling out fleet-wide.
Viam maintains configuration history, so you can roll back with one change: revert to a previous version of a fragment, module, or model with a single update.
Maintenance keeps your fleet running. Monitoring gives you visibility into how it's running. With Viam, that visibility comes from a single dashboard—no SSH required, no jumping between tools.
Need a refresher on how to get started with Viam?
Learn moreRemote monitoring and operations
Once your fleet is deployed, you need visibility and control without physically accessing each machine.
Fleet-wide observability lets you see online/offline status, data sync progress, and logs for every machine, filtered by location or tags. Get notified through alerting when machines go offline, encounter errors, or meet conditions you define.
Access control provides role-based permissions for team members and API keys for programmatic access, letting you control who can view, operate, or configure each machine.
Stream logs remotely by viewing machine logs in the web app, filtered by level, keyword, or time range.
Write scripts on your laptop that connect to a machine over the network to run code against remote hardware—inspect component state, run diagnostics, or test behavior without deploying code.
You can view live camera and sensor data, seeing camera feeds and sensor readings in the web app's TEST panel for each component.
You can also teleoperate from the browser to drive a base with keyboard controls, move an arm to specific positions, or reposition a gantry, all from the web UI.
Live 3D views of your machines show component positions, camera feeds, and point clouds—so you can move components and watch the visualization update in real time.
These capabilities work whether you're managing robots for your own operations or building a robotics product for customers—and if you're doing the latter, you face another layer of infrastructure challenges.
Building robotics products with Viam
Most robotics companies spend months building customer infrastructure—authentication, billing systems, branded dashboards—before they can ship their first product.
If you're building a robotics product for customers rather than just deploying internally, Viam provides this layer so you can focus on your core application.
White-label authentication lets customers authenticate through a login screen with your logo and branding, not Viam's.
You can build customer-facing apps using the TypeScript SDK for web dashboards or the Flutter SDK for iOS and Android apps—both handle authentication and provide access to all component and service APIs.
Built-in billing lets you define pricing tiers—per-machine fees, data costs, or both—while Viam handles invoicing and payment collection.
With customer infrastructure handled alongside operational capabilities, you can focus development time on your robotics application rather than building supporting systems.
Next up
These production capabilities—deployment at scale, fleet maintenance, remote operations, and customer delivery—complete the development workflow from hardware configuration to shipped product.
Ready to build? Check out the Viam Docs for quickstart guides and tutorials.
