After Chinese Robot Dogs Row, Another Galgotias Claim Questioned Online

Galgotias University has come under renewed online questioning after it stated that staff and students on its Greater Noida campus had built a soccer drone from scratch. The claim surfaced on the day the institution was asked to leave the expo area of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi following a separate dispute over the origin of robotic dogs it had presented, sources said.

The soccer drone claim centres on a device that the university described as the product of its own end-to-end engineering. 

"So they basically, from the end-to-end engineering to the application, we have a simulation lab to an application arena and that's India's first soccer arena on campus," a Galgotias University employee can be heard saying on videos surfacing online. 

Users on social media claimed that the drone is a commercially available model known as the Striker V3 ARF, which can be purchased in the Indian market for around Rs 40,000. The Helsel Striker V3 is indeed a soccer drone developed by South Korea's Helsel Group for drone sports.

Earlier in the day, sources told NDTV that  Galgotias University representatives were asked to vacate the expo area after a video from the event showed them presenting a four-legged robot as a product developed by the university's Centre of Excellence.

The robot on display was the Unitree Go2, a model made by the Chinese company Unitree Robotics. The same machine is sold online in India for between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 3 lakh. At the summit the device was labelled "Orion".

A separate interview clip showed a university professor making the identical assertion, stating that the robot had been built at the Centre of Excellence.

Social media users identified the machine within hours as the imported Unitree Go2 and accused the university of presenting foreign technology as an Indian development.

Galgotias University responded on X, formerly Twitter, saying that the robotic dog had been bought from Unitree and was being used only as a learning tool for students. It insisted the university had never claimed to have built the device.