Qualcomm, the US chipmaker best known for smartphone processors, has agreed to acquire PickNik, the company behind the MoveIt robotics software.
Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal is subject to customary closing conditions.
MoveIt is widely used across industrial robotics to handle motion planning, working out how a robot arm should move to reach and handle objects.
It runs on the Robot Operating System (ROS), a popular open-source framework for building robot software.
Qualcomm said the purchase gives it a software layer to sit on top of Dragonwing, its robotics hardware and developer platform.
The aim is to link the three stages of robot behaviour: perception, planning and movement.
Qualcomm described the deal as a way to drive adoption and upgrades rather than a near-term source of revenue.
MoveIt will remain open-source, so it will stay compatible with third-party hardware and the existing ROS community.
Qualcomm plans to begin integrating MoveIt with platforms including VENTUNO Q (IQ-8275), its robotics developer hardware.
The goal is to shorten the path from AI models running on the device to physical motion.
Those models include large language models (LLMs), which process text, and vision-language models (VLMs), which interpret images alongside text.
