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

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.