Abstract: A method and apparatus for virtualizing industrial vehicles to automate task execution in a physical environment is described. In one embodiment, the method includes determining input parameters for controlling vehicle hardware components, wherein the vehicle hardware components comprise actuators that are used to control hardware component operations, generating mappings between the input parameters and the hardware component operations, wherein each of the input parameters is applied to an actuator to perform an corresponding hardware component operation, correlating the mappings with vehicle commands to produce abstraction information and executing at least one task comprising various ones of the vehicle commands using the abstraction information.