The chipmaker is getting its hands on the historical maintainer of MoveIt, a robotic manipulation framework derived from ROS, to bring it closer to its Dragonwing platform. Undisclosed amount.
Qualcomm announced on September 23, 2026 the acquisition of PickNik Robotics, a company founded in 2015 in Boulder (Colorado) and a long-time maintainer of MoveIt. This planning and manipulation framework, born in the lead of the Robot Operating System project at Willow Garage, is one of the most widely deployed bricks in the open robotic ecosystem. Financial terms have not been communicated and the transaction remains subject to normal closing conditions.
The commitment displayed is about continuity: MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 would remain under their current open source license, with roadmaps still determined by the community. The industrial interest for Qualcomm is elsewhere — in the rapprochement between MoveIt and its Dragonwing platform, including Arduino VENTUNO Q cards, in order to shorten the path from vision-language-action models to real-time planning, manipulation and control.
PickNik co-founder Dave Coleman presents the operation as a way to accelerate and expand investment in MoveIt as an AI platform for robotics. PickNik made himself known during the Amazon Picking Challenge, with Google as the first customer. The acquisition extends Qualcomm's strategy in physical AI, where the manufacturer seeks to occupy the software layer as well as silicon.
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