Running a workflow in the cloud sim

The cloud simulator runs your workflow against a virtual robot in a virtual scene. No hardware, no setup. You open the project and run. This is where you catch a reversed waypoint or a wrong plate position before a real arm ever tries it, so most of a hackathon is spent here.

What you need

• A project. See Your first project.
• A workflow to run. See Authoring a workflow.
• A world with the objects your workflow references. See Building a world. For a first run an empty world loads fine, though the workflow will not have anything to reach for.

Running it

1. Open https://zeonsystems.app and go to your project.
2. From Home, click Execute Workflow to open the Workflow Editor.
3. Pick the workflow and the world at the top of the screen, and click Load if the world does not come up on its own.
4. Fill in the workflow's inputs. If the workflow has a canvas, you fill in that form instead. See Creating a canvas.
5. Click Run, and name the run if you want it labelled in your history.

The rest of this page is what happens after you click Run. For the panels and controls themselves, see The Workflow Editor.

What you see during a run

The 3D viewport on the left shows the simulated robot moving through the scene. Orbit, pan and zoom with the mouse. In the graph in the middle, the current node is highlighted and completed nodes are marked, so you can follow where execution has reached. The Log tab on the right streams per-node messages, parameter values, and any errors as they happen.

If a skill needs a decision from you mid-run, execution pauses and a prompt appears for your input before it continues.

When a skill fails, whether an unreachable target, an invalid parameter, or an unmet precondition, execution stops at that node and the error surfaces in the Log tab.

Pausing and stopping

• Pause stops the arm immediately, mid-motion, and halts execution after the current node. Resume picks up from there.
• Stop ends the run. The scene is left as it was; the arm does not return to any home position on its own. In the simulator that costs nothing, but it is worth knowing before you rely on the same buttons on real hardware, where the arm really is left where it stopped. See Running a workflow on real hardware.

What is actually happening

When you click Run, the app tells your personal cloud instance to run this workflow against this world. The instance loads both from cloud storage, runs the simulation, and streams the 3D scene back to your browser in real time. You do not manage that instance: it is there when you sign in.

A run changes nothing durable. The workflow and the world are exactly as you authored them afterwards. If a skill moves or places something during the run, that lives only for the length of the run; the saved world is untouched. There is no separate save step.

Iterating

Sim runs cost you only time, so the normal rhythm is to edit, sync, run, and repeat, several times, before you touch hardware. When the workflow does what you want in the simulator, take it to a real robot: Running a workflow on real hardware.