India-made robots shine at AI Impact Summit 2026 after early controversy

New Delhi: Indigenously manufactured and developed robots emerged as a major attraction at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, despite an early controversy over an Indian university's claim that a China-made robot dog was its own.

Among these, SVAN-M2, a robot dog by Kanpur-based startup xTerra Robotics, was a crowd puller.

Co-founder of xTerra Robotics said the product took years of translational research by students and faculty of IIT Kanpur.

The SVAN-M2, which has an aluminium alloy body and legs, uses its light detection and ranging (LiDAR) device to create accurate 3D representations of its environment.

It can be used for monitoring a hazardous area or at power stations for inspecting the facility with thermal imaging. In the security domain, the robot dog can play a key role in threat detection and save lives by 3D-mapping an area and relaying the images to a team away from the site.

Founded by Nimesh Khandelwal, Avinash Bhashkar, Amritanshu Manu, Aditya Rajawat and Shakti S Gupta in 2023, xTerra Robotics is on the IIT Kanpur campus.

The firm is planning to scale up production of SVAN-M2 and make the pricing more competitive, said Co-founder Sakshi S Gupta. The start-up and L and T are working together to bring SVAN-M2 and other such robots to construction sites.

"This scaling up would make the product extremely cost-competitive with the Chinese product. However, the current pricing of the product is at par with that from China in the same class," she said.

The AI Impact Summit was held from February 16-20 at the Bharat Mandapam, which saw the presence of several heads of state, many global artificial intelligence (AI) leaders, academicians and researchers, heads of global tech giants, and philanthropists.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the summit here on Thursday, in the presence of several world leaders and heads of global tech giants.

The summit, however, was not without its share of controversies.

Private university Galgotias made the headlines for trying to pass off a Chinese innovation as its own. The university was asked to vacate the event premises on Wednesday and remove its stall.

Meanwhile, the United Nations World Food Programme's (UNWFP) robot drew significant attention. Conceptualised and developed in India, the eight-foot-tall tower-shaped robot, a pilot project, has been developed for the warehouses of the Food Corporation of India and state godowns.

It has a plug-and-play infrastructure, and depending on sensors, can simultaneously detect things such as temperature and leakage of gases, including phosphine, which can be fatal for humans if inhaled.

The warehouses use phosphine as a fumigant to keep the pests away.

"If this robot is in the warehouse, then no one has to go inside for inspection during the fumigation. Whatever is happening inside the godown…this is our eye for it," said Amit Kumar of UN-WFP.

"We have just tested it in Narela (food storage depot). It needs a bit of optimisation, following which it will be piloted in a warehouse in around one to two months," he said.

The Madhya Pradesh pavilion displayed the state's first 3D printed humanoid robot developed by students of Class 7 and 8 with support from startup, Youngovator.

The two-foot-high Yug Bot has a skeletal structure made of plastic with a few wires running across the structure from top to bottom and left to right. Its head is cuboid, which has two small circles in the centre, with artificial eyes.

"This is an out-and-out indigenous product," said Karthik Pandey, head of technical operations at the Youngovator.

The startup, which supports children at various schools in their tech-related endeavours, plans to scale up the bot.

Pandey said they are working with the Madhya Pradesh government and testing it for traffic and crowd management, given its hand-gesture functionalities.