Robots

The most important concept in Design Studio is a robot. A robot is a program designed to accomplish some task involving a data source, usually a website or a desktop application, but it could also be an Excel or a PDF document, or a different Kofax product, such as Kofax TotalAgility or Kofax SignDoc.

In Kofax RPA, you can create two types of robots: Basic Engine Robot and, simply, Robot. The main distinctive feature is the browser technology that robots use to interact with websites.

Robots

These robots are designed to interact with websites and automate remote applications where the state resides on the server/application side. In this case, the state is external to the robot. Robot is the primary type of robots, and we highly recommend that you use it for all processes that you need to automate.

In Kofax RPA, you can create robots that can automate work processes involving Windows and Java applications on your networked computers. The workflow of a robot is a sequence of steps that are executed one after the other. The steps model how a user would interact with the website or the application that is being automated. See Robot Building and Introduction to Robot Building for details.

The Document Transformation feature of Robots helps you extract and use information from images and text documents. The Document Transformation action processes your graphical or PDF documents using a selected project. A project is a module that processes and transforms your documents using OCR and other specified operations. See Document Transformation for details.

Basic Engine Robots

These robots were initially designed to automate stateless applications where the state resides internally in the robot. Due to its limitations, we recommend that you use Robots for all processes that you need to automate. However, you can keep your existing Basic Engine Robots as long as the target application or website does not change significantly. For more information on this robot type, see Basic Engine Robots.