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 2