Over the time, automation of technical processes became a major research objective, its results being applied in industry, mainly in manufacturing; automation includes robots to increase the productivity of companies that become thus competitive. Advances in software programming techniques combined with new sensing and motion control technologies are rapidly expanding the scope of robot applications; robots are coming out of their cages to work alongside humans. This has significant implications on how organisations will be structured in the future. The most rapid advances in robotics and automation are driven by new, intelligent software techniques that enable applications to analyse, find patterns in- and make predictions from- big data in less time and more accurately than humans. These broad techniques are being applied in almost every industry to improve the accuracy, quality and speed of specific processes. Nowadays, the automation processes have spread from the technical domain to the business one, but the essence is the same - allowing digital robots to automate high volume, repetitive, routine business processes using one of the newest technology available for automating digital processes - Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The purpose of this technology inspired from robotics is to learn activities performed by operators, to emulate human skills and replicate them by digital autonomous robots (software programs) that cooperate for the execution of high volume, repetitive tasks. Software robots have started using Artificial Intelligence techniques such as Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, cluster analysis and pattern recognition to predict resource performances, detect anomalies, forecast service demand, and to deploy models for the contextual enterprise from mobile to cloud using data integration, analytics, and cognitive computing. This paper describes an online learning path that a student has to take in order to understand the main software elements of robotic process automation, and to implement the stages of a process that is automatized with RPA: process discovery; designing the automation solution; solution development - symbols, development environments for RPA processes and automation objects, managing errors, configuring scalable processing queues; testing RPA robots; implementing the RPA robot according to business requirements. This RPA platform is available online and features both theoretical concepts and a practical part which will learn students how to create production-ready automation workflows and components. A related knowledge testing methodology is defined and presented in the paper.

Robotic Process Automation, eLearning platform, automation workflows, automating software bots,