In 2024, India's premier science institute refused to buy robot dogs made abroad, and it named the brands it meant. This year, that rule disappeared from its tenders. The change says a lot about where robotics is heading, and about a question India hasn't answered.
In February, a four-legged robot called Orion turned one university's stall at the India AI Impact Summit into a national talking point. A Galgotias University professor told DD News that the robot had been developed at the university's Centre of Excellence. Once the clip went viral, people online identified it as a Unitree Go2, built by China's Unitree Robotics, and the university was asked to vacate its stall. The same model sells online in India for roughly ₹2 lakh to ₹3 lakh. The university later apologised, saying the representative who spoke had been misinformed and that there was no intent to mislead.
The episode was good for a few days of jokes. It also left a serious point behind: it is easy to put an Indian name on a robot built somewhere else.
Sixteen months earlier, the Indian Institute of Science had written a rule that covers exactly that situation. In October 2024, its Centre for Cyber Physical Systems invited bids for seven robot dogs. The tender said the robots could not be imported from abroad. It even named names: Boston Dynamics, Unitree, ANYbotics, Xiaomi and eight others, with a note that the list was not complete. Unitree, the maker of the Galgotias dog, was third on it. If the robot a company brought to IISc's demonstration turned out to be imported, that company was out of the race.
This year, IISc went shopping for robot dogs again, twice. Neither tender contains that rule.
A missing paragraph in a procurement document is not usually news. This one matters because of the job it did. The 2024 tender checked two separate things: that the company selling the robot was an Indian manufacturer, and that the robot itself was not made abroad. The 2026 tenders still check the first. The second is gone.
For Indian companies building robot dogs, the old rule was a promise. They would not lose an order from the country's top science institute to an imported machine with an Indian label. For IISc's own researchers, the same rule was a restriction. It kept Unitree's machines off the shopping list, and those are used widely in research and teaching around the world. The centre itself already lists a Unitree legged robot among its lab equipment. And for everyone else, it raises a question that India's push for self-reliance hasn't really settled. When anyone can order a capable robot body online, which part of a robot has to be Indian for it to count as Indian?
A word on what the paperwork does and doesn't show. It doesn't say why IISc dropped the rule. It doesn't say who bid, which robot was offered or whether IISc has bought anything. Nothing in it shows IISc buying a foreign robot dog. What it shows, clearly, is a line that was there in 2024 and was missing in 2026.
What changed
The first new tender went up on 13 May 2026, for two heavy-duty robot dogs. It was plainly built on the 2024 document. Whole sections were copied across, and the form bidders had to sign still carried the old tender's title. Most of the old engineering rules came along too, down to a ban on certain kinds of gearbox. The line about imported robots did not.
That tender lasted exactly a week. On 20 May, IISc cancelled it "due to administrative reason," and said nothing more. On 19 June, a second tender appeared, this time for a single robot. The line was missing again. In July, IISc amended that tender. It gave suppliers more time to deliver, eased a computing requirement, and stated that everything else would stay as it was. The rule did not come back.
None of this means IISc has thrown its doors open. Both new tenders still say the seller must be an Indian manufacturer or that manufacturer's authorised distributor. Both keep India's local-content rules, which require at least a fifth of a product's value to be Indian and give preference to bids that reach half. On paper, that still points towards Indian robots.
What's missing is the moment of truth. In 2024, someone would look at the actual machine on the demonstration floor and check where it came from. In 2026, the tenders rely on company paperwork and declarations instead. The documents don't say whether that is enough to keep an imported robot out.
The June tender did add something new. The new tenders no longer ask where the robot comes from. The June one does ask who can talk to it. The robot must be able to run completely offline and encrypt everything it sends. It must also use a radio link built to survive electronic warfare, hopping frequencies when it senses interference. That last demand is an unusual one for a machine whose stated job is to help researchers study walking. Nothing in the documents explains it, and nothing in them establishes any military use.
Buy the body, build the brain
Put the three tenders side by side and one thing never changes. All of them say the robots are for research on learning-based locomotion controllers, which is a technical way of saying software that teaches a robot how to walk. All of them demand deep access to the robot's motors, so researchers can run their own code rather than the manufacturer's. At IISc, the walking is the research.
What changed is how IISc wanted the body. In 2024, it asked for seven robots built to its own detailed engineering rules and delivered in three batches over about 17 months. In 2026, it wanted delivery within a month of the order. By June, it had dropped most of the engineering rules and left the robot's size and weight up to the seller. That looks less like commissioning a robot and more like buying one.
It is also how AI research already works. Most labs don't build their own chips. They buy the hardware and put their energy into the software that runs on it. Robotics may be heading the same way. A robot like the Galgotias dog is a product you can simply order online in India, which shows how far that has already gone. Buy the body, build the brain.
From a researcher's point of view, a rule about where the body comes from can start to look like it is guarding the wrong door. The documents never say that this is IISc's thinking. What they show is a research goal that stayed fixed while the rules about the body fell away.
The other half of IISc
The complication is that India is spending serious money on the opposite idea, and some of it sits at IISc.
ARTPARK, the AI and robotics park at IISc, hosts CAMRAS, an accelerator the Ministry of Heavy Industries set up to shrink India's dependence on imported robot hardware such as motors, controllers and actuators. Legged walking robots are one of its first projects. The ministry puts the project's cost at ₹92.88 crore, about four-fifths of it from the ministry itself. Its project page links the legged-robot work to a company called Strider Robotics.
IISc's robotics centre sits on both sides of the line too. Its own facilities page lists two legged robots among its research equipment. One is Stoch-3, a quadruped developed at IISc. The other is a Unitree.
There is nothing contradictory about that. A university can help build Indian robots and still use foreign ones for research. But it sharpens the question. If an Indian lab writes the software that makes an imported robot walk, is that Indian robotics? If the motors inside an Indian-built robot come from abroad, is that self-reliance? The 2024 tender answered with the body. The 2026 tenders are silent on it.
What happens next
The story stops where the paper trail does. As of 18 September 2026, IISc's tenders page shows nothing new for the June tender since the July amendment. We have not found an award notice, a purchase order or a list of bidders. The 2024 tender has a loose end of its own. If it went to plan, all seven robots would have arrived by the end of February 2026. Whether they did is not in any public record we could find.
So nothing here shows IISc buying a foreign robot dog. What it shows is a rule that existed in 2024 and was gone by 2026. That happened in the same year India watched how easily an imported robot dog can end up presented as a home-grown one.
In 2024, IISc's answer to what makes a robot dog Indian included the machine itself. In 2026, it rests on the company and its paperwork. Whether that turns out to matter depends on a document that isn't public yet: the order for whatever robot IISc ends up buying, if it buys one at all.
