Robotics is becoming one of the most interesting areas of the technology industry, and companies that traditionally focused on chips and computing are increasingly getting involved in the software side as well. Qualcomm is the latest major technology company to make such a move. On September 23, the company announced an agreement to acquire PickNik, a robotics software company known for its work on open-source robotics development.

PickNik is closely associated with MoveIt, an open-source framework used by robotics developers to control and program robotic arms and other manipulation systems. MoveIt is designed to help developers handle tasks such as motion planning and robot manipulation without having to build every software component from the beginning. Qualcomm says MoveIt will remain open and community-driven after the acquisition.

The acquisition is part of Qualcomm's broader interest in what the company calls physical AI. Unlike software that only operates on a computer or phone, physical AI is designed to interact with the real world through machines such as robots, drones and autonomous systems. These machines need to understand their surroundings and respond quickly, which requires a combination of artificial intelligence, sensors, processors and specialised software.

One of the interesting parts of Qualcomm's announcement is its focus on making robotics development more accessible. The company says MoveIt will be integrated with its Dragonwing robotics platforms as well as Arduino platforms. This could give developers more ways to experiment with robotics while using existing open-source tools.

For developers, open-source software is particularly important in robotics because building a complete robotic system can be extremely complicated. A robot may need software for sensing, movement, navigation, communication and decision-making. Having widely used frameworks available can save development time and allow engineers to concentrate on the specific problem they are trying to solve.

Qualcomm's involvement also shows how the robotics industry is becoming closely connected with edge computing. Robots cannot always rely on sending every piece of information to a remote cloud server. Many tasks require decisions to be made locally, especially when a machine is moving around people or handling objects. This makes efficient processors and on-device AI increasingly important.

The company is also positioning its robotics hardware as part of a broader computing ecosystem. Instead of treating the processor as the only important component, Qualcomm is working toward a combination of hardware, AI capabilities and software that developers can use to build different kinds of intelligent machines.

There is still a long way to go before robots become capable of handling the wide range of tasks humans perform every day. Real-world environments are unpredictable, and robots need to deal with problems that are much harder than those encountered by ordinary software. A program can recover from an error by restarting a process, but a physical robot has to consider movement, timing, safety and its surroundings.

That makes software frameworks such as MoveIt particularly relevant. Better robotics software can help developers create systems that plan movements more effectively and interact with physical objects in a more controlled way.

Qualcomm's acquisition is therefore about more than adding another company to its portfolio. It reflects a broader change in the technology industry, where companies are increasingly looking at robotics as the next major area for AI applications.

As AI moves beyond chatbots and computer screens, the combination of powerful processors, open-source software and robotics platforms could become increasingly important. Qualcomm's investment in PickNik is one more indication that the competition in AI is gradually expanding into the physical world.