You can publish collections via the REST API. When using this method you can deploy by checksum or from an archive.
For example, to publish an Ansible collection to a repository called ansible-local, you could use the following:
curl -u<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD> -XPUT http://localhost:8080/artifactory/ansible-local/<PATH_TO_METADATA_ROOT> -T <TARGET_FILE_PATH>
where <PATH_TO_METADATA_ROOT> specifies the path from the repository root to the deploy folder.