🇫🇷Eliott
Sarrey

The robot started as a problem Eliott Sarrey had been thinking about since before he turned fourteen. Growing up in Maron, a small commune near Nancy in the Lorraine region of northeastern France, he had developed an interest in electronics and programming that went well beyond what his school curriculum offered. He was the kind of teenager who built things to understand them — who worked backwards from a question to the components needed to answer it. The question he settled on was practical: could a small robot, controlled by a smartphone, manage a greenhouse independently? Water the plants. Move the pots. Prepare the soil. Work without continuous human supervision.

He built it in three months. The prototype — a robot on wheels equipped with an articulated arm — could execute the key tasks of amateur horticulture: taking pots, digging the earth, pricking out seedlings, and watering on a scheduled basis. The control interface was a smartphone application. The robot was constructed using an amateur CNC milling machine. The materials were accessible; the engineering was original. He named it Bot2Karot.

In 2015, he submitted Bot2Karot to the Google Science Fair, a global competition organized by Google, CERN, National Geographic, Scientific American, and LEGO that invites students aged 13 to 18 to present original scientific and engineering research. The competition receives entries from more than one hundred countries. Judges assess not just the technical quality of projects but their originality, potential impact, and the depth of their scientific underpinning. Eliott's entry was in the 13–15 age category. His project reached the global finals — an achievement that placed him among a handful of finalists selected from tens of thousands of submissions worldwide.

On September 21, 2015, at the Google headquarters in San Francisco, Eliott Sarrey was awarded the Incubator Prize — one of the Google Science Fair's top honors, awarded to projects demonstrating exceptional innovation and commercial or scientific potential. The prize included €10,000 and a year of mentorship backed by a Google engineer. He was the first French student in the competition's history to win a Google Science Fair prize. French media covered the award extensively; he returned home from San Francisco to be greeted at his school in Nancy like, as one French broadcaster put it, a rock star.

The Google Science Fair award opened doors that would have required years of conventional academic progress to reach. Inria — the French national research institute dedicated to mathematics and digital science, one of Europe's most respected research institutions — invited Sarrey to intern with the Neurosys team, a research unit operating at the intersection of neuroscience and computational science. The team works on questions related to neural computation, brain-machine interfaces, and the simulation of neural activity. Eliott, as a teenager, joined them — designing and working on a robotic hand with neural control applications. The transition from a garden robot in Lorraine to a neuroscience laboratory at Inria was not incidental; it was the logical unfolding of a scientific mind finding its next problem.

Bot2Karot addressed a genuine challenge in urban and hobbyist agriculture: the labor intensity of maintaining a greenhouse or garden without professional support. The robot's design was modular and cost-controlled, built with components accessible to an amateur maker. The smartphone control interface made operation intuitive. These were not accidental design choices — they reflected thinking about who the end user was and what constraints they faced. For a fourteen-year-old in Lorraine building things in an amateur workshop, these were unusually sophisticated design considerations.

Eliott Sarrey went on to continue developing his technical work after the Inria internship, moving into areas of AI, photonics, and applied engineering. He co-founded Arago, a company working on AI-driven photonic computing — a field at the frontier of hardware and artificial intelligence that applies light-based computation to problems in machine learning and communications. The progression from a garden robot built at fourteen to AI photonics in his twenties describes a scientist who found his medium early and has spent every year since pushing further into it.