Made in India robots shine at AI Impact Summit after early controversy

Indigenous Robots Draw Attention at AI Summit

PTI, Feb 21, 2026, New Delhi: Indigenously manufactured and developed robots emerged as a major attraction at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, despite an early 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.