Qualcomm buys PickNik, keeps MoveIt open

Today: the biggest motion planning project in robotics changes owner but not license, Arduino’s robotics board gets a software partner, Rust bindings for ROS 2 pick up a new distro, an autonomous aircraft crosses the United States, a security study backdoors real industrial arms, and a deterministic stack clones itself over a one way link.

Qualcomm acquires PickNik and keeps MoveIt open source

Qualcomm Technologies has agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the Boulder company behind MoveIt, the manipulation framework most ROS users reach for when an arm has to plan a motion. The amount was not disclosed and closing is subject to customary conditions. Qualcomm says it will keep MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 open source under their existing license, with community driven roadmaps, and continue supporting MoveIt across third party hardware.

Dave Coleman, PickNik’s founder and chief product officer, reports more than 560 contributors across 40 repositories, 6,700 GitHub stars and 4,400 forks, with the two main MoveIt papers cited over 1,700 times. MoveIt started at Willow Garage and now runs in NASA missions, surgical robots, warehouse logistics and airport baggage handling.

Qualcomm’s stated reason is the direction of the field: policy models need to run on the robot, in real time, inside a power budget, so the hard problems become joint software and hardware design. The questions for developers are whether the license and governance hold over time, and whether PickNik’s hybrid path, learned policies alongside deterministic geometric planning, becomes the default production architecture. Background: what ROS 2 is.

Sources: Qualcomm, PickNik, The Robot Report.

Arduino’s VENTUNO Q wants to be the single board a robot runs on

Arduino opened pre-orders for VENTUNO Q, its first board designed as a single control point for a robotics platform. The architecture is two headed: a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 processor rated at up to 40 dense TOPS of AI performance next to an STM32H5 real-time microcontroller, so Linux workloads and motor control share one board. Arduino lists 16 GB of LPDDR5, 64 GB of eMMC, an M.2 connector for NVMe Gen 4, Wi Fi 6 tri-band, three MIPI CSI camera connectors and CAN-FD. Ubuntu comes preloaded, distributed by Canonical, and the MCU runs the Arduino Core on Zephyr RTOS. Those specifications are the manufacturer’s.

The software story matters more than the silicon list. Arduino reports ROS 2 compatibility built in, support for UNO shields, Modulino nodes over Qwiic and Raspberry Pi HATs, and NPU optimized models through Arduino App Lab powered by Qualcomm AI Hub, currently Qwen 3 4B, Qwen 2.5 7B, Gemma 4 E2B and E4B, Whisper, Melo and Piper text to speech, YoloX object detection and MediaPipe gesture recognition. Marcello Majonchi, Arduino’s chief product officer at Qualcomm, framed the target as putting sensing, reasoning and actuation in one place, offline, because a warehouse or offshore plant cannot assume a fast link.

Qualcomm plans to integrate MoveIt with VENTUNO Q and Dragonwing, demonstrated at ROSCon Toronto. Watch whether that ships as a real ROS 2 package rather than a demo, and whether the Dragonwing IQ8 SOM variants from partners such as SECO and Toradex preserve the same stack for production. See also choosing between Jetson Orin Nano and Orin NX.

Sources: Arduino, The Robot Report.

rclrs 0.8.0 lands with ROS 2 Lyrical support

The Rust bindings for ROS 2 shipped rclrs 0.8.0 on 23 September. The release notes list support for ROS 2 Lyrical Luth, with bindings regenerated for Humble, Jazzy, Kilted, Lyrical and Rolling.

The change with the widest blast radius is message access. ROS message packages are now consumed through ros-env, keeping rclrs, applications and generated messages on the same definitions, and applications using generated messages must add the dependency and import them with use ros_env::*;, which is breaking, as are the reworked parameter callback APIs. On the useful side, ActionClientState now exposes server_is_available, action server tasks no longer require Sync, and TopicEndpointInfo reports its QoS profile, making graph inspection easier when a publisher and subscriber disagree about reliability. Related concepts: topics, services and actions.

Sources: ROS Discourse, GitHub release.

An aircraft crossed the United States with zero safety pilot inputs

Joby Aviation reported on 18 September that an aircraft equipped with its autonomy technology completed the first autonomous flight across the United States. The J208, a converted Cessna Caravan, flew 3,199 miles with zero control inputs from the onboard safety pilot, performing autonomous taxiing, takeoffs, route navigation and landings while supervised remotely from California and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, up to 2,323 miles away.

The stops carry the engineering argument. The aircraft integrated into Phoenix Deer Valley, one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country, and rerouted around severe weather in real time without prior airport familiarity, ending with a low pass near the First Flight Monument at Kitty Hawk. Joby’s pitch is that retrofitting autonomy onto an already certified airframe is cheaper than certifying a new one, aimed at freight, medical transport, disaster response and defense logistics.

For robotics readers this is the supervision model being argued about for ground robots, where one remote operator covers many machines under constrained bandwidth. These are Joby’s own published figures. Background: why VLA models matter.

Source: Joby Aviation.

A security study puts backdoors on real FANUC and xArm hardware

arXiv paper 2609.26868, by Zijian Zhang, Zhen Zeng, Zhongshu Gu and Sandeep Pisharody, is an empirical study of backdoor attacks in learning based manipulation, accepted at the IROS 2026 Workshop on Industrial Applications of Robot Learning. The authors run the work on two real commercial arms, a FANUC and a UFACTORY xArm, and ask whether a backdoored policy can behave normally during benign operation while producing attacker chosen behavior when a specific trigger appears, and whether that stays stealthy during nominal tasks.

They build an online defense pipeline that detects and neutralizes triggers at runtime and compare it against an offline fine tuning defense. Critically, they also measure the latency and execution overhead of the defense, because a mitigation that costs too much cycle time will not run on a high throughput line. This is a concrete reason to test trigger resistance in any policy sourced from outside your team before it reaches a controller that can move metal.

Source: arXiv.

Copper-rs 1.2 clones a deterministic robot state over a lossy one way link

The Rust robotics stack copper-rs released version 1.2 with telemetry twins. The announcement describes streaming the robot’s copperlists over a link that may drop packets in one direction, using forward error correction to send repair packets for the past stream, with a twin stack on the ground that decodes, repairs and reorders the data to reconstruct full robot state. Heavier losses trigger self healing recovery points the twin can jump to.

Determinism is what makes it work: if the stack can replay exactly from a set of minimal inputs, the twin is a full clone rather than a sampled approximation. The release reports a copperlist encoding optimization, with a flight controller logging example improving from 5.9816 to 7.0975 bits per byte of entropy, 52.31 percent smaller in bytes, which matters for robots that log mostly metadata rather than images. There is also a new cu-anynet stereo depth component and more ROS 2 compatibility work. Compare with rosbag2 record and replay.

Sources: Copper Robotics, GitHub.

Quick Bites

• PitPro Automation installed its first automatic tire changing system at a Kal Tire shop in Calgary, Alberta, TechCrunch reports: two oven sized robots loosen lug nuts and swap four tires in under 15 minutes, sharing the bay with mechanics.
• Assembly Magazine details a machine vision and CNN system for body in white lines, with two 12 megapixel cameras per cabin and 8,092 images from 674 cabin assemblies yielding 63,073 spot welds, flagging bad welds and predicting welding robot maintenance.
• arXiv:2609.26989 releases Spiderbot, an open source hexapod with 2 degrees of freedom per leg and a four bar linkage plus passive spring carrying body weight, drawing 1.5 W in stance and handling payloads to 3.25 kg, with CAD, assembly instructions and an RL policy trained in mjlab with sim to real transfer.
• The ROSCon Toronto session on Kubernetes and KubeEdge with ROS 2 has a follow up thread for fleet operators, with an online meeting planned for October.