Qualcomm to buy PickNik and keep MoveIt open source

Qualcomm Technologies has agreed to buy PickNik, the robotics software company that has spent years maintaining MoveIt, and the framework is not going behind a licence wall. The press note went out on 23 September 2026 from San Diego, and both companies said the deal is expected to close subject to customary closing conditions. No price was disclosed.

MoveIt stays open and moves closer to Dragonwing

MoveIt is one of the most widely adopted open-source frameworks for robot manipulation, and Qualcomm is promising to keep it that way. MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 will remain open, community-driven and supported across third-party hardware platforms, and the expectation is tighter integration with Qualcomm’s Dragonwing robotics platforms and Arduino boards rather than a closed fork.

The technical pitch is a shorter path from a model to a moving arm. Qualcomm describes a more streamlined route from AI models such as vision-language-action and vision-language models through to planning, manipulation and real-time control, which is the part of robotics that usually takes the longest to get from a demo to a machine that works every day.

Why Qualcomm wants the steward, not just the software

Nakul Duggal, executive vice president and group general manager for automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and robotics at Qualcomm Technologies, framed the purchase as a bet on software rather than silicon. “Robotics is one of the most exciting frontiers of physical AI, and software is the connective tissue that turns great hardware into great robots,” he said, adding that the company plans to keep the openness and collaboration that made MoveIt successful.

Dave Coleman, PickNik’s founder and chief product officer, said the deal gives the team room to expand investment in MoveIt as an AI training platform for robotics while preserving the community collaboration and cross-platform support the project was built on. He described the company’s mission since its founding as providing industries with a powerful, open platform that accelerates advanced robotics well beyond traditional factories.

The first public proof is on the ROSCon floor

The announcement landed at ROSCon Toronto, where the two companies are showing MoveIt Pro running on VENTUNO Q and Dragonwing robotics platforms at Qualcomm Technologies’ booths (9/10 and 16) and PickNik’s booth 7. Until the transaction closes, the practical question for developers is what Qualcomm’s stewardship does to MoveIt’s release cadence, its hardware-neutral support and the commercial MoveIt Pro layer that PickNik sells on top.

Our opinion

Qualcomm buying the steward of MoveIt is a cleverer move than buying a robot company, because MoveIt is where a large share of the ROS world’s manipulation code already lives: own the layer everyone builds on and Dragonwing silicon becomes the path of least resistance. The risk is the one that follows every open-source acquisition. MoveIt’s value comes from being neutral, and a framework that is fastest on one vendor’s boards is no longer neutral, whatever the licence says. The test to watch is not the press release but the next two or three releases: whether fixes land for competitors’ hardware on the same schedule, whether maintainers outside Qualcomm keep merge rights, and whether MoveIt Pro stays a product rather than becoming the only supported route. Keep the repository genuinely open and this is good news for robotics; drift into vendor-shaped support and the community has options, because a fork of MoveIt would be painful but not impossible.