Qualcomm agrees to buy PickNik, steward of open-source MoveIt, to pull robot motion software onto its Dragonwing chips

Qualcomm Technologies said on 23 September 2026 that it had agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the Boulder, Colorado software company that has stewarded MoveIt, one of the most widely used open-source frameworks for planning how robot arms move. The deal, unveiled at ROSCon in Toronto, gives the chipmaker control of the software layer that sits between an AI model's decision and a robot's joints. Qualcomm said it would integrate that software more closely with its Dragonwing robotics processors while keeping MoveIt open.

Neither company disclosed a price. Qualcomm's release said the closing is subject to customary closing conditions and gave no target date, and a post by PickNik founder Dave Coleman on the same day contained no financial terms either. The purchase is the third developer-focused acquisition Qualcomm has announced in under a year, after Arduino agreed on 7 October 2025 to join the company and Qualcomm agreed on 24 June 2026 to buy the AI software firm Modular. Terms were withheld in both of those deals as well.

Qualcomm attached three public commitments to the deal. MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 are to remain open source under their existing license, with community-driven roadmaps. Qualcomm said it intends to keep supporting MoveIt on third-party hardware, describing the framework's hardware-agnostic design as a key enabler. And MoveIt, MoveIt Pro and future PickNik technologies are set to become more closely integrated with Dragonwing, which Qualcomm said should give developers on its chips first-class, optimised support for motion planning, manipulation, perception and kinematics, and a shorter path from vision-language-action models (VLAs) and vision-language models (VLMs) to real-time control.

The deal also reaches into the hobbyist and education market. Qualcomm said MoveIt integration with Arduino would start with the Arduino VENTUNO Q boards, with the stated aim of reaching millions of developers. The two companies said they would show MoveIt Pro running on VENTUNO Q and Dragonwing hardware at ROSCon. Both are founding members of the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), and Qualcomm said it intends to keep driving Space ROS, a hardened version of ROS for critical uses such as space exploration.

PickNik was founded in 2015 by Coleman as a consulting shop for MoveIt, according to his post, and was financed early on through the European Union's ROSin programme, the US Small Business Innovation Research programme and Acutronic Robotics. MoveIt itself began at Willow Garage, the robotics lab that closed in 2014. Coleman wrote that the project now counts more than 560 contributors across 40 repositories, about 6,700 GitHub stars and 4,400 forks, and two core papers cited more than 1,700 times. He listed deployments ranging from NASA missions and surgical robots to warehouse logistics, cell therapy manufacturing, strawberry picking and airport baggage handling. The company's commercial product, MoveIt Pro, ships with a Behaviors Hub of more than 600 pre-built skills, according to its website. Dave Grant is chief executive and Coleman is chief product officer.

Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm's executive vice president and group general manager for automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and robotics, called software "the connective tissue that turns great hardware into great robots" and said the aim was to make it easier to build robot applications on Dragonwing while keeping MoveIt open. Coleman said joining Qualcomm would let PickNik expand investment in MoveIt as an AI training platform for robotics. In his post he gave the technical rationale more bluntly, arguing that capable AI models need to run on the robot in real time and within a power budget rather than in a data centre.

That argument explains why a chip company wants a motion planner. A VLA model can decide that a robot should pick up a part, but something still has to turn that intent into a collision-free path, solve the arm's kinematics and stream joint commands at control rates. MoveIt does that work, and today it runs on whatever processor a robot builder chooses. If Qualcomm can make the planner, perception and an on-board model run fastest and most efficiently on Dragonwing, it gains a reason for robot makers to standardise on its silicon without closing the software.

The acquisition fits a robotics push that Qualcomm has built in public during 2026. At CES on 4 January it introduced the Dragonwing IQ10 Series for humanoids and advanced mobile robots and named Figure, KUKA Robotics, VinMotion, Booster, Advantech, AutoCore and Robotec.ai among those working with it. Its IQ10 robotics reference design, described in a May 2026 product brief, is rated at up to 700 TOPS (sparse) with 18 Oryon CPU cores, a safety island and a ROS 2 software stack on Ubuntu. On 10 June NEURA Robotics named Qualcomm Technologies as a strategic investor and technology partner in a Series C round of up to $1.4 billion, and the Arduino UNO Q board already runs on a Dragonwing QRB2210 processor.

The obvious rival is NVIDIA, whose Jetson AGX Thor module went on sale on 25 August 2025 with a stated 2,070 FP4 teraflops at 130 watts and a $3,499 developer kit. NVIDIA listed Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics and Figure among early adopters and said more than 2 million developers use its robotics stack. Software is the other front. A day before Qualcomm's announcement, Intrinsic, which said in February 2026 that it was joining Google, released Intrinsic Core under the Apache 2.0 license, including motion planning, grasp planning and Gazebo simulation services for FANUC and Universal Robots arms. Intrinsic had already bought the commercial arm of Open Robotics in December 2022, while the ROS, Gazebo and Open-RMF intellectual property stayed with the non-profit Open Source Robotics Foundation.

The open questions are about trust and neutrality. PickNik's MoveIt Pro customers build on many kinds of compute, and Qualcomm has not said how it will price MoveIt Pro or whether optimised features will appear first, or only, on Dragonwing. Open Robotics said on 28 September that it expects MoveIt to stay open and pointed to Qualcomm's earlier investment in its work, but the community will judge by maintainer activity, release cadence and whether pull requests that favour other chips keep landing. Integration is also unproven, because Qualcomm has given no timetable for the Dragonwing optimisations or the VENTUNO Q support beyond the ROSCon demonstration.

Three things will show whether the strategy works. The first is a closing announcement, which Qualcomm has not dated. The second is the first MoveIt 2 releases after closing, which will show whether the license, governance and maintainer roster are unchanged. The third is CES in January 2027, where Qualcomm's robotics partners from this year could show whether MoveIt Pro on Dragonwing has moved from booth demo to shipping product.