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Deployment, Commissioning, and Fleet Management

MoveIt Pro provides a robust platform for deploying and operating production-grade robotic systems. It is designed to take your robots from development to real-world environments with reliability, flexibility, and ease of maintenance. Below is a high-level overview of how MoveIt Pro supports robot commissioning, robot deployment, fleet management, and operator interaction in production environments.

Software Deployment​

MoveIt Pro is built for scalable, resilient software deployments. The MoveIt Pro runtime is Dockerized, allowing customers to deploy and update systems easily using hardened, tested virtual environments. These Docker containers share access with the host system for real-time hardware interfaces, network communications, and file systems.

MoveIt Pro uses multiple Docker images for its runtime, enabling a distributed, optionally multi-machine architecture. Real-time control processes can be isolated on a dedicated machine or CPU core, separate from your GPU loads. High-level logic and planning processes can operate on a separate machine for optimized performance. Computationally intensive tasks (e.g., GPU-enabled machine learning inference) can be offloaded to specialized hardware nodes.

MoveIt Pro leverages the popular ROS 2 communication framework to provide flexible network-wide communication between components via topics, services, and actions. Customers often run additional Docker containers alongside MoveIt Pro for supporting tasks like Operator HMIs (Human-Machine Interfaces) and PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) integrations. Using ROS isn’t necessary, however, thanks to our SDK.

For scaling to larger deployments, we recommend using a system configuration management tool like Ansible to manage your installation and updates reliably across multiple systems.

Robot Commissioning​

MoveIt Pro uses a concept called a robot_config, a ROS package that contains all critical configuration information for a robot, including:

  • Hardware-specific settings (e.g., IP addresses, serial ports)

  • Robot description files (kinematics, motion planning settings, collision geometry)

  • Calibration files (kinematic and sensor calibration)

  • MoveIt Pro Objectives (Behavior Trees and custom Behaviors)

One key feature is that robot_configs can inherit from other robot_configs, making it easy to manage fleets of similar robots. You can maintain a common base configuration while customizing only specific parameters like individual serial numbers, calibration settings, or hardware-specific ports.

Fleet Management​

MoveIt Pro’s architecture is designed with remote operations in mind. You can configure your robots behind a VPN or other tunneling technology to enable remote access to the MoveIt Pro web interface securely. We recommend ZeroTier for a lightweight solution.

For full-featured fleet management, we recommend integrating with our partner Formant. MoveIt Pro offers a light integration with Formant’s platform, but its HTTP-based web interface is flexible enough to support any fleet management system capable of network tunneling including custom ones you build in-house.

Operator HMI​

MoveIt Pro offers multiple options for building user-facing interfaces:

  • ROS-native communication allows integration with any ROS-based tools.

  • Non-ROS integration is supported via the rosbridge SDK, available in Python, JavaScript, and other languages, making it easy to build web or native applications.

  • Headless mode operation is fully supported, enabling deployment with your own custom Operator HMI solutions.

  • Mixed user permissions (available with the Ultimate tier) allow differentiated access, enabling trained engineers to perform system updates or recalibration procedures directly from the HMI.

Through these flexible options, MoveIt Pro ensures that your operators have the tools they need to run, monitor, and maintain robot systems safely and efficiently.