PickNik builds MoveIt Pro, a production grade software platform for robotic manipulation. 200+ pre built AI skills, behavior trees, physics simulation, ROS 2 native. Customers include NASA, BMW, Lockheed Martin, Philips.
PickNik Robotics is a Boulder software company focused on robot manipulation and deployment tooling. Founded in 2015, it leads the open-source MoveIt ecosystem and commercializes that work through MoveIt Pro, a production-grade platform for motion planning, perception, behavior orchestration, and hardware-agnostic robotics deployment.
By 2025, PickNik was highlighting MoveIt Pro 8.0 and related releases as a mature, production-grade robotics application platform. The company’s positioning emphasized hardware-agnostic deployment, advanced behaviors, and AI-era manipulation software for enterprise and space customers.
PickNik Robotics was founded in 2015 after the team formed around the Amazon Picking Challenge and broader robot-manipulation problems. The company’s early identity centered on building and stewarding core software used across the robotics industry.
In 2021, PickNik began a focused pivot from engineering services toward a scalable product strategy. That shift led to the development of MoveIt Studio as a commercial layer on top of its open-source manipulation work.
In February 2024, PickNik rebranded its flagship product from MoveIt Studio to MoveIt Pro. The new name reflected the expansion of the runtime, developer environment, and pre-built behaviors that support deployment in real-world unstructured environments.
By 2025, PickNik was highlighting MoveIt Pro 8.0 and related releases as a mature, production-grade robotics application platform. The company’s positioning emphasized hardware-agnostic deployment, advanced behaviors, and AI-era manipulation software for enterprise and space customers.
PickNik sits at the software and developer-tools layer of robotics rather than at the humanoid hardware layer. Its role in the ecosystem comes from turning open-source manipulation software into a supported commercial platform that can shorten deployment cycles for teams working in space, logistics, manufacturing, and other unstructured environments.
