PickNik

Robotics · Physical AI · Developer Tools

Acquisition

Qualcomm agrees to acquire robotics software firm PickNik, maker of MoveIt

Chipmakers are climbing the stack, buying open-source developer trust rather than trying to build it from scratch.

• Qualcomm Technologies agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the steward of the open-source MoveIt robotics manipulation framework; terms were not disclosed and the deal is subject to customary closing conditions.
• Founded in 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, PickNik grew out of MoveIt's origins at Willow Garage and built its commercial platform, MoveIt Pro, on top of the widely used open-source project.
• MoveIt spans 40 repositories with over 560 contributors, 6,700 GitHub stars and 4,400 forks, and its core papers have been cited more than 1,700 times.
• Qualcomm plans to integrate MoveIt's motion planning, manipulation, perception and kinematics tools more closely with its Dragonwing robotics platforms, giving developers a faster path from AI models like VLAs and VLMs to real-time robot control.
• Qualcomm also plans to extend MoveIt support to Arduino hardware starting with the VENTUNO Q board, and pledged that MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 will remain open-source and community-supported across third-party hardware.
• PickNik previously worked on the Amazon Picking Challenge, counted Google as its first customer, and partnered with Motiv Space Systems this year on software for NASA's Fly Foundational Robotics mission.
• The deal shows chipmakers moving up the stack into software to lock in developers before robotics scales, betting that mature open-source frameworks, not just silicon, will decide who wins physical AI.