A method in a robot of providing hardware abstraction for robot control software. A plurality of resource drivers for the robot includes resource drivers for which no corresponding hardware is present on the robot. Resources that are available on the robot are automatically detected based a hardware configuration detected for the robot. A request is received from the robot control software to use a type of resource. A resource that corresponds to the type of resource requested by the robot control software is automatically selected. A first information related to use of the selected resource is provided in a unit of measure that is related to a robot. A second information related to the use requested by the robot control software is provided in a unit of measure that is related to a corresponding device. The method converts between the first information and the second information based on the detected configuration of the robot.