Unity announces support for open source robotics middleware suite

Unity, the creator and operator of real-time 3D (RT3D) content, has announced support for ROS 2 – the open source robotics middleware suite from Open Robotics. Building on its support of ROS earlier this year, Unity is now supporting ROS 2 due to significant advancements and support of more hardware drivers, networking modules, communication architecture, and several robot algorithms.

“The addition of real-time support makes it suitable for time-critical and high-performance systems, including AMRs, which we demonstrate with Unity running a ROS 2 navigation stack,” said Dr Danny Lange, SVP of AI and machine learning, Unity.

The company has also released a new sample AMR project. The demo showcases a simple warehouse environment, a fully articulated model of a Turtlebot 3 mobile robot with simulated LIDAR and motor controllers, and a Dockerfile to make it easy to build an image containing all of the ROS 2 dependencies necessary to exercise the mapping and navigation stacks against simulation.

“This demo is another powerful example of how we take a flexible framework for writing robot software, and couple it with our robotics packages so that users can more easily create intelligent robots,” said Lange.

“Simulation is a critical part of developing robust robot systems and it’s important for developers to be able to choose the right simulator for their application. It is a welcome addition to the growing community of roboticists who are using open source software to accelerate the development of advanced systems,” he added.