Founders
The two researchers whose synergy resolved an engineering bottleneck.
Both founders hold PhDs in Robotics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, with subsequent research and industry roles in India and the UK. Xtent's platform is built directly on their published research and engineering work.
Dr. Ashwin K. P.
Ashwin leads Xtent's business strategy, technology direction, as well as India and UAE business development. His research work spanning a decade focused on a question that has remained consistent across: biological snakes are slender throughout the body and can lift their bodies high and far, while robots in the literature require bulky hardware that eliminate the snake-like behaviour they aim to replicate. His research, and Xtent's platform, address that gap directly.
His published work spans kinematic modelling of cable-driven continuum robots, optimization-based motion planning, and dexterous remote intervention. Earlier in his career he held design and avionics engineering roles in industry, followed by a faculty appointment in Mechanical Engineering at BITS Pilani, Goa. He founded Xtent in 2025 to build the system the research had been pointing toward.
Dr. Ashith R. Babu
Ashith leads Xtent's control systems architecture, software development, and the company's presence in the UK and European subsea ecosystem. His doctoral and postdoctoral work covered learning-based control, free-floating spacecraft manipulation, and autonomous robotics architectures across IISc Bangalore, the University of Lincoln, and the Surrey Space Centre. He subsequently moved into industrial software engineering, developing end-to-end software stacks for innovative robots that are currently being sold in the European markets.
Ashith's proprietary software and learning-based control algorithms power the tentacle-arm platform that gives Xtent its competitive edge. His UK base grants the company access to the state-of-the-art research networks in the UK as well as the North Sea subsea inspection market.