Robot gardener is Google winner

A ROBOT gardener invented by 14-year-old Lorraine boy has won a €10,000 prize at the Google Science Fair – plus help from Google engineers to develop his idea.

Eliott Sarrey was all smiles last night as he received his trophy as one of the world’s top young inventors for his Bot2Karot robot gardener.

He was the only French contestant and the first ever French winner of the event, at Google’s Mountain View HQ in California.

Eliott, from Maron, near Nancy, Lorraine, had designed and built his Bot2Karot – pronounced like botte de carrotte [bunch of carrots] – using 3D software, a 3D printer and an electric drill burr. It took three months and, when finished, will be controlled by smartphone.

The finished robot will take over some of the back-breaking work in gardening, especially tending low plants, and can hoe, bed up plants and water them. It will allow the disabled to do some gardening themselves.

Eliott’s Incubator award celebrates a student between the ages of 13 and 15 whose project shows extraordinary promise in a field of science.

The Google Science Fair contest is restricted to youngsters from 13-18 from round the world and the top prize of a €50,000 scholarship went to Connecticut 16-year-old Olivia Hallisey, of Greenwich High School, who designed a portable blood testing device to detect ebola.

Sutton Grammar School pupil Krtin Nithiyanandam, from Surrey, won the Scientific American Innovator Award for developing a “molecular Trojan horse for the earlier, minimally-invasive detection of Alzheimer’s”.

Here are all the Google Science Fair winners with Eliott Sarrey, extreme left; Krtin Nithiyanandam, second left, and Olivia Hallisey, third left.

Big congratulations to the winners of the 2015 #GoogleScienceFair! http://t.co/Buids7Oj8f pic.twitter.com/dwbqKJzcTO— Google (@google) September 22, 2015