The following features will be added to Robot Manager 6 (requires PRPC 7.4 or 8.1 and Runtime 8.0 SP1 Version TBD at the time of release): Ability to Start / Stop Robots from RM; Ability to Move robots between work groups; Ability to schedule robots to start / stop / move.

The new features will leverage framework of the existing RPA Scheduling service, which will still need to be installed on bot machines because this is where the bot needs to be logged on and perform the work. The enhancement will enable RPA Scheduling Service communicate with RM to receive start / stop schedule. This is different from how today RPA Scheduling Service reads the schedule that is maintained and saved on the bot machine.

Robot Manager 6 will have centralized scheduling.  This is scheduled for release in late Q4/2018 or early Q1/2019.

Thanks for the answer Jeff /petrg.

Does the scheduling work only with the bots which are liked to a case management  (RPA bots )  or in general any bots can be scheduled as many clients may not use Pega case management for the Automation scenarios?

Scheduling will be done through Robot Manager 6.  Your robots will need to be registered with Robot Manager in order to be scheduled by it.  The Workgroup that a robot is assigned to will determine the deployment package that is loaded.  What that package does is under your control.  The intent of the product is that robots would work cases in that Workgroup, however ultimately the package decides what to do.  Therefore, it would be possible to use a Workgroup to start a robot and not feed it case work.  In that case you could use some other mechanism for directing what the robot would do.  This is often the case when you have producer robots which create cases for other robots to work.

Robot Manager 6 and RPA Service with centralized scheduling functionality has been released. Download and documentation is here: https://community.pega.com/marketplace/components/pega-robot-manager