VirTooS: A ROS 2 - Unity Virtualization Toolkit for Fleet Management of Autonomous Mobile Robots
2026-08-26 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present VirTooS, a software toolkit that helps manage groups of autonomous robots. It uses ROS 2 and the Unity game engine to create realistic virtual environments where both simulated and real robots can work together. Their toolkit supports sensors like LiDAR for mapping and navigation, and includes routines for running experiments with distributed robots. They demonstrate task assignment scenarios and make deployment easy through containerization. The code will be available publicly on GitHub.
Autonomous Mobile RobotsROS 2Unity game engineLiDARmixed-realitydistributed roboticstask assignmentvirtual simulationcontainerizationChoiRbot framework
Authors
Andrea Drudi, Lorenzo Pichierri, Andrea Testa, Giuseppe Notarstefano
Abstract
In this paper, we present VirTooS, a Python/C# toolkit designed to implement fleet-management tasks on teams of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs). VirTooS leverages the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 and Unity game engine to provide realistic, scalable virtual experiments in a mixed-reality environment. The toolbox allows users to easily generate and customize virtual scenarios for realistic simulations. Virtual and real sensors as, e.g., LiDARs, can be exploited to map and safely navigate in the mixed-reality environment. To enable distributed robotics experiments, we propose a set of tailored routines leveraging the ChoiRbot framework. As a motivating example, we show a set of experiments for task assignment problems in a virtual environment, allowing seamless interaction among real and virtual robots. Moreover, the package comes with a containerized suite to easily deploy it on different machines. The source code will be made publicly available on GitHub.