In February 2026, a video did the rounds of Indian tech circles that looked almost too casual to be a product launch: a rugged four-legged robot striding through Bengaluru traffic, pausing, sensing, and rerouting itself around scooters and pedestrians like it had somewhere to be. There was no stage and no keynote — just a machine built in the city, walking its own streets. Behind it stands General Autonomy, a Bengaluru robotics startup with a blunt founding philosophy: not assembled, not bought — built in India, by Indians.
The robot is called Param, and the company describes it as India’s most powerful indigenous robot dog. The declaration came on X in the company’s own words: “Enough of this nonsense! Presenting PARAM: India’s most powerful indigenous robot dog. Not assembled, not bought, BUILT IN INDIA, built by INDIANS. For our nation, for our century, for our world!”
The team that decided to build
General Autonomy was founded in 2023 by Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh, with a mission Ahsan has described as revolutionising the future of factories — “factories are complex puzzles, and automation is the key to seeing the full picture.” Before Param, the team had built Atom-1, a walking humanoid robot, and the company says the quadruped drew heavily on those learnings. The Param project itself, the company has said, came together in about seven months of focused development.
What Param can do
Param weighs 35 kg and can carry up to 20 kg — a serious payload for a quadruped its size, opening up logistics support, surveillance equipment transport and sensor payloads. It moves at up to 3 metres per second (about 11 km/h), can jump a metre high, and runs for eight hours on hot-swappable batteries — close to a full shift without tethering to a charger.
The intelligence is in the legs and the eyes. Param navigates autonomously, detects and reroutes around obstacles, tracks targets, climbs stairs up to 30 centimetres, and sidesteps into a sideways “crab walk” to slip through low clearances. If it falls, it gets back up on its own. The company notes that only the NVIDIA Jetson GPU and the specialised actuators are non-Indian components; the mechanical design, locomotion software and systems integration were engineered in-house in Bengaluru.
From the expo floor to the Prime Minister
Param’s public debut came at the India AI Impact Expo 2026 in New Delhi, where it drew crowds — and its timing was electric. The same summit had been roiled by a controversy over a university exhibit that turned out to be a rebranded imported robot; Param arrived as the genuine article, designed and built from scratch by Indian engineers. Weeks earlier, the startup had presented Param to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the National Startup Day 2026 deep-tech showcase, in the presence of Union Minister Piyush Goyal.
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Why it matters
Quadruped robotics is one of those categories India has watched from the sidelines — the platforms doing the world’s most visible work are American and Chinese. Param is the opposite story: a locomotion stack, perception system and machine designed and built in Bengaluru, demonstrated in the open, on Indian streets. The applications the company is aiming at — factory inspections, disaster response in unsafe zones, border surveillance and scientific research — are exactly the jobs where a sure-footed, long-endurance robot earns its keep.
From a startup founded to rethink factories to a robot dog that turned a national AI summit into its launchpad — Param suggests India’s robotics story is moving from assembling machines to authoring them.
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