Universal Robots cobots are everywhere — over 100,000 deployed worldwide, running everything from machine tending to palletising to welding. But once they’re on the factory floor, most sites have no way to monitor them remotely. The cobot is either running, or someone walks over and finds out it isn’t. This post covers exactly what data a UR cobot exposes, how RoboVigil connects natively to pull that data, and what you can actually do with it.
Why Monitor a Cobot?
The whole point of automating with a cobot is to let machines run without someone standing over them. A UR10e tending a CNC machine means that CNC can keep cutting parts through lunch, through shift changes, through the night. That’s the ROI case — extended unattended running time.
But unattended only works if you know when something goes wrong. A cobot that hits a protective stop at 2am because the gripper lost vacuum on a part doesn’t just stop itself — it stops the CNC it’s feeding. Both machines sit idle until the morning shift arrives and someone walks over and notices. That’s six hours of lost production on a cell you specifically automated to avoid exactly that.
This is why push notifications from a monitoring platform aren’t a nice-to-have — they’re the missing piece that makes the cobot investment actually deliver. You deployed the cobot so the machine could run unattended. RoboVigil tells you the moment it stops, so “unattended” doesn’t become “unaware.” Your maintenance engineer gets a notification on their phone, walks over, clears the fault, and the cell is back in production — not six hours later, but six minutes later.
Beyond the immediate alerts, there’s the longer-term visibility. Knowing that cell 3 has had four protective stops this week when it normally has one. Knowing that your UR5e’s joint 2 current draw has been creeping up over the past fortnight. These are the patterns that turn reactive firefighting into managed uptime — but you only see them if you’re capturing the data in the first place.
What Data Does a Universal Robot Expose?
UR cobots are genuinely impressive compared to much of the industrial equipment out there. Universal Robots provides three distinct interfaces for external communication, all available over the network with no additional hardware or licensing. UR also publishes a client libraries page documenting how external systems can connect — the documentation is genuinely good.
RTDE — Real-Time Data Exchange (Port 30004)
RTDE is the primary data interface and the richest source of production telemetry. It streams structured data packets at up to 500 Hz — far faster than any monitoring system needs, but it means you never miss a state change.
What you get from RTDE includes actual and target joint positions for all six axes, joint temperatures and currents, TCP (tool centre point) position and orientation, TCP force and torque readings, robot mode and safety status, digital and analogue I/O states, program state and runtime variables, and speed scaling factors.
For monitoring purposes, the critical outputs are robot mode (is it running, idle, or in a fault state), safety status (normal, protective stop, emergency stop, violation), program state (playing, paused, stopped), and the I/O states that tell you what’s happening in the wider cell — part present, gripper open, fixture clamped.
RTDE is a subscribe-and-stream protocol. You define a “recipe” of the specific variables you want, and the controller sends them continuously. RoboVigil’s native UR connector subscribes to a monitoring-optimised recipe — enough to track production state, cycle times, and fault conditions without flooding the network with 500 Hz joint position data that no cloud monitoring system needs.
Dashboard Server (Port 29999)
The Dashboard Server is a simple text-based TCP interface designed for remote control and status queries. You send a command string, you get a response.
The commands relevant to monitoring are robotmode (returns the current mode — Running, Idle, etc.), running (is a program executing), get loaded program (which program is loaded), safetystatus (normal, reduced, protective stop, recovery, etc.), and programState (playing, stopped, paused).
RoboVigil uses the Dashboard Server for high-level state confirmation and for detecting which program is loaded — useful when a cell runs different programs for different parts. It’s lightweight, reliable, and available on every UR controller from CB3 onwards.
Primary Interface (Port 30001)
The Primary Interface predates RTDE and sends a continuous stream of robot state data at 10 Hz. It’s less configurable than RTDE — you get everything in a fixed packet format — but it provides error codes and log messages that RTDE doesn’t surface.
RoboVigil uses the Primary Interface primarily for fault diagnostics. When a protective stop occurs, RTDE tells you it happened; the Primary Interface tells you why — the specific error code and violation type. That’s the difference between knowing your cobot stopped and knowing that joint 4 exceeded its force limit at a specific point in the program.
How RoboVigil Connects
RoboVigil’s UR connector is native — built specifically for Universal Robots’ protocol stack, not a generic OPC-UA or Modbus wrapper. It connects directly to the three interfaces described above over the factory network.
Here’s what’s involved in deployment:
On the factory side: Your UR cobot needs to be on the factory network (it already is if you’re programming it from PolyScope over Ethernet). A WireGuard VPN tunnel is configured on your existing router to create a secure connection to RoboVigil’s cloud. No port forwarding, no firewall exceptions, no hardware to install.
On the RoboVigil side: You add the machine, point it at the cobot’s IP address through the VPN, and the connector starts pulling data. There’s no software to install on the cobot itself. No URCap. No USB stick. The cobot doesn’t know or care that it’s being monitored — RoboVigil reads from interfaces that UR designed specifically for external systems to consume.
Time from decision to live monitoring: Under an hour if your router supports WireGuard (most modern industrial routers do). The longest part is configuring the VPN tunnel, and RoboVigil provides the configuration file for that just drop it into your routers web interface.
What You See in RoboVigil
Once connected, the RoboVigil app — on iOS, Android, or the web — shows you:
Live status. Is the cobot running, idle, or faulted? Updated in real time. If you’ve got an IP camera pointed at the cell (and you probably should), you get a live video feed alongside the data.
Cycle tracking. RoboVigil detects program cycles automatically from the RTDE data — when a cycle starts, when it completes, how long it took. Over time, this builds a picture of your cobot’s OEE without anyone entering data into a spreadsheet.
Alerts. Protective stop? You get a push notification on your phone. Program stopped unexpectedly? Notification. You define what matters; RoboVigil tells you when it happens.
Fault history. Ask any UR technician how you get fault logs off a Universal Robot and they’ll tell you the same thing: you plug a USB stick into the teach pendant and manually export them. That’s fine when you’re standing in front of the robot. It’s useless when you’re trying to diagnose an intermittent fault that happened on the night shift, or when the cobot is at a customer site 200 miles away, or when you need to send logs to UR support and the robot is in production and nobody wants to stop it to pull data. RoboVigil captures every protective stop, every safety violation, every unexpected program halt remotely, automatically and continuously — with the error code from the Primary Interface, the timestamp, the active program, the fault detail and a shot from the camera. It’s all there in the app, without anyone touching the teach pendant. No USB stick. No walking to the machine. No waiting for someone on site to do it for you.
Multi-site visibility. If you’re running URs across multiple sites — and many companies are, because cobots are the first automation that SMEs actually deploy — every cobot appears in a single dashboard. No VPN hopping between sites. No phoning the night shift to ask if the cobot’s still running.
What RoboVigil Doesn’t Do
It doesn’t control the robot. RoboVigil is read-only monitoring. It won’t start programs, jog axes, or modify variables. This is deliberate — it means there’s no safety case to argue, no risk assessment to update, no “what if the cloud platform sends the wrong command” conversation with your safety officer.
It doesn’t replace PolyScope. If you need to program the cobot, teach waypoints, or configure I/O, you still use the teach pendant or UR’s own tools. RoboVigil monitors what’s happening; it doesn’t change what’s happening.
It doesn’t do predictive maintenance — yet. The joint current and temperature data from RTDE could support trend analysis and early fault detection. That’s on the roadmap. Today, RoboVigil gives you the historical data to spot trends yourself. The engineer who notices joint 2 running 15% hotter this month than last month is doing predictive maintenance; they just don’t need an AI to tell them.
The Gap in UR’s Monitoring
The data interfaces are excellent — RTDE, Dashboard Server, Primary Interface are some of the best-documented and most accessible in industrial robotics. But UR ships no built-in remote monitoring. There’s no cloud dashboard, no mobile app, no push notifications. The cobot streams rich data over the network, and unless you’ve built something to catch it, that data goes nowhere.
If your cobot faults at 2am, nobody knows until someone walks past it. If you want to pull fault logs, you plug a USB stick into the teach pendant and export them manually. For a platform that’s otherwise brilliantly designed for ease of use, remote monitoring is lacking.
The third-party options in the UR ecosystem such as Robotiq Insights, sold through the UR+ marketplace may offer remote monitoring and SMS alerts, but it comes with significant limitations. It requires hardware — Robotiq ships a preconfigured 4G LTE router, antennae, and a prepaid SIM card as part of the starter kit. Remote access requires someone to physically insert a USB key into the robot controller before you can connect. Pricing isn’t published; you request a quote, and it’s sold as a 1-year subscription. And it only works with Universal Robots — if your factory also has ABB robots, or the UR is working with a CNC machine, or a packaging line, you’re running a separate system for each.
RoboVigil fills the gap differently. It’s software-only — no router to ship, no SIM card, no USB stick. It uses your existing factory network with a WireGuard VPN tunnel, so remote access is always on, not something you have to enable by visiting the machine. Fault logs are captured automatically and continuously from the Primary Interface — no manual export, no USB, no interrupting production. And because RoboVigil isn’t UR-only, those six cobots sit in the same dashboard as your ABB IRC5s (via Robot Web Services), your CNC machines (via OPC-UA), and anything else running MQTT. One platform, one set of alerts, one app on your phone.
The camera integration adds another layer. RoboVigil lets you point an IP camera at the cell and see exactly what’s happening alongside the data. When the robot reports a protective stop, the camera shows you whether it’s a fallen part, a mis-loaded fixture, or someone who walked into the cell. Data tells you what happened but the camera gives you the full story.
Supported UR Models
RoboVigil’s native connector works with every Universal Robots model currently in production and the previous generation:
The e-Series (UR3e, UR5e, UR10e, UR16e) and the newer UR Series (UR15, UR18, UR20, UR30) all expose RTDE, Dashboard Server, and Primary Interface over Ethernet as standard. CB3-series robots (UR3, UR5, UR10) with software 3.4 or newer also support RTDE; older CB3 firmware supports Dashboard Server and Primary Interface only.
In practice, if your cobot was purchased in the last eight years, RoboVigil will connect to it without any changes to the controller.
What It Costs
RoboVigil is £150 per machine per month. That’s the cobot data plus camera feed. No per-user fees — your maintenance lead, production manager, and operations director all see the same data. No feature tiers — every machine gets the full platform.
For context: a single hour of unplanned downtime on a CNC machine that a cobot is tending typically costs more than a month of RoboVigil monitoring.
Getting Started
Sign up at robovigil.com, configure the WireGuard tunnel on your router, put your connection details into Machine Setup in the app and RoboVigil handles the rest. If you want to see it working before you commit, the demo factory shows live data from simulated machines — including Universal Robots — so you can see exactly what the experience looks like.
If you’re running Universal Robots and you’re currently finding out about problems by walking the floor, this is what you’ve been missing.
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