Meet Mitra, The 5-Foot Made-In-India Robot That Greeted PM Modi And Ivanka Trump At GES 2017

US President Donald Trump¡¯s daughter Ivanka Trump was in India earlier Tuesday, to inaugurate the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

And what better way to show off Indian engineering than by having her be greeted by a local-made robot?

PMO India/Twitter

Ivanka Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were welcomed to the event in Hyderabad by Mitra, a robot built by Bengaluru-based Invento Robotics. Mitra was one of two of the company¡¯s humanoid bots present at the event.

It's programmed to greet customers and interacts using facial and speech recognition, contextual help, and autonomous navigation.

The 5-foot-tall Mitra robot is also serving humans in a few Canara Bank branches as well as PVR Cinema outlets in Bengaluru. Through www.mitrarobot.com, Invento Robotics allows Mitra robot for rent for interactive sessions at offices, hotels, and even private birthday parties.

Intriguingly, Invento Robotics is only about a year old. Invento Makerspaces, as it was originally called, was initially set up as an educational startup. It was only in 2015, when one of the startup¡¯s robots gained a little notoriety at a market fair, that the founders realised they had another field they could better contribute to.

Unfortunately, things didn¡¯t go exactly as Invento CEO Balaji Viswanathan had hoped they would at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017. Both Ivanka and Modi were supposed to separately press a button each on the robot¡¯s touch display, in order to kick off the summit. Instead, both delegates pressed their buttons at the same time.

After a few awkward seconds of silently waiting, thankfully one of them seemed to raise their finger enough for the device to register two separate touches. Seems like a problem easily anticipated with a proper multi-touch display guys.