Warning

Warning: Unity Simulation is deprecated as of December 2023, and is no longer available.

Create a vehicle model

Now that you have installed the Unity Simulation Authoring tools, we're ready to rock and roll. Let's build some simulations!

The vehicle model is the robot arm, AMR, or driverless car you are simulating. You can add sensors to it to generate observations from the Unity scene and use vehicle controllers to control how it behaves. You'll probably want to include your vehicle models in a synthetic environment that can be varied and randomized.

Let's get more specific. What makes up a vehicle model?

A vehicle model is represented in Unity as a hierarchy of GameObjects with:

• Visual geometry, which defines how the object looks and is interpreted by the rendering pipeline.
• Articulation bodies, which define how the links move with respect to each other (e.g., revolute or prismatic joints) as well as the object's mass.
• Collision geometry, which defines how objects contact each other.

Unity Forklift GameObject hierarchy

Articulation bodies and mesh colliders are PhysX components that can be attached to a GameObject in Unity. Without them, the GameObject has no physical properties and will pass through other objects.

We have several ways to get to this end state, and you can mix and match them together. You can import some parts, re-link them differently, and create some geometry manually.

• Create or import geometry and add physical properties manually.
• Import from file with physical properties and geometry all in one.