Qualcomm to buy PickNik Robotics, says MoveIt stays open source
The company said it will keep MoveIt 1 and 2 under their existing licence and fold PickNik's commercial MoveIt Pro into its Dragonwing platform. Terms were not disclosed.
Qualcomm has agreed to acquire PickNik, the Boulder company that maintains the open-source robotics framework MoveIt, the two said at ROSCon in Toronto. Terms were not disclosed, and the deal is subject to customary closing conditions.
Three market-news accounts carried the announcement within an hour of each other on Wednesday, and The Robot Report published the fullest account of it. Qualcomm said it will keep MoveIt 1 and 2 open source under their existing licence and community roadmaps, and will continue supporting MoveIt on third-party hardware.
MoveIt handles motion planning and manipulation, the software that decides how a robot arm moves. Qualcomm said pairing it with Dragonwing, its robotics chip platform, should shorten the path from an AI model to planning and real-time control. That claim is the company's own.
PickNik was founded in 2015 and counted Google as an early customer. Dave Coleman, its founder and chief product officer, said joining Qualcomm would let the company expand investment in MoveIt as a training platform for robotics. Nakul Duggal, a Qualcomm executive vice-president, said PickNik had earned trust through its stewardship of MoveIt.
Neither company gave a price, a closing date or a headcount. Nvidia released Isaac ROS 5.0 as free and open source at the same conference a day earlier. Qualcomm has not said what happens to MoveIt's governance once the deal closes.