Blue Frog Robotics and Zoho Creator: Managing robots using low-code

The company

Blue Frog Robotics is a French Robotics company founded by Rodolphe Hasselvander in 2014. The company specializes in engineering social robots that enhance people's lives.

The robots they produce can be remotely controlled with a tablet. This makes the robots versatile, as all that is needed to interact with the robots is the requisite software on the tablet.

Blue Frog Robotics has many notable customers. One being the French education ministry who have purchased 2,000 robots from the company. The specific name of the robot is "Buddy" which runs on the Android OS.

The challenge

The main challenge for Blue Frog Robotics was to provide an amicable robot that can be interacted with by any member of a typical family. It should also adhere to all safety regulations, as well as comply with global standards such as GDPR.

Marc Goulan, the Chief Product Officer of Blue Frog Robotics, started looking for a software solution which would allow them to link the user securely (using a handheld device such as a tablet) to the robot.

Due to the huge order from the French education ministry, Goulan needed a capable software to deliver the order within a short time. He couldn't work on developing the server architecture or a holistic solution from the ground up, as the deadline was too short.

The main requirement was to administer Buddy by connecting it to a tablet which issued commands to it. Each Buddy unit had to be safely paired with a tablet to achieve this.

Goulan had previously heard about low-code platforms, especially Zoho's offering, Creator. He read about the integration capabilities of the APIs of this low-code platform, and after a quick prototype later, realized Zoho Creator would be a viable platform on which to build Buddy's interfaces.

The solution

With Zoho Creator, there was no need to spend time on technical software engineering architecture such as the backend and front end. On the platform, Goulan's team could simply program the necessary logic from the client-side and publish it server-side on Zoho Creator.

Zoho Creator was also viable economically. Goulan could assess exactly how many users would be needed for the customer portal and could factor in portal usage accordingly.

The dashboard

The dashboard Blue Frog Robotics created is comprised of the following elements:

• The Stock tab which displays the inventory listing all the deployed robots. It also lists the deliveries, listed deliveries, management of loans, and key performance indicators.

Dashboard modules

• Stock report: This is used to view the robots in stock. It has fields such as IMEI, product names, to whom it was sold, the partner involved, and the name of the final client.
• Loans report: This shows all the outstanding loans, who initiated the loan, the duration of the loan, and other details such as pertinent dates.
• Knowledge base: Functioning as a resource guide, this provides requisite knowledge to the application's users.
• Ticket tracking report: This displays all the tickets being tracked at various stages of their respective lifecycles.
• Accounts and contacts report: Here, all the contact information of pertinent contacts is displayed.
• Package products report: This displays all the products.

The software allows the remote management of robots from a central, unified dashboard.

Benefits and ROI

Goulan remarked that Blue Frog Robotics has saved up to 30% of the total cost when comparing alternative solutions other than Zoho Creator to administer the robots.

Looking forward

The roadmap is to make more robust and secure robots. Additionally, the software needs to be accessible enough for the other developers to create their own applications on the platform. The end objective is to enable external developers, distributors, or integrators to make their own applications for Buddy. In order to do that, Blue Frog Robotics also built a software development kit (SDK). The company also intends to leverage the APIs of Creator extensively. More so, Goulan noted the intention to branch out to other Zoho products.