Julien Mellet

Julien Mellet is a robotics engineer building drones for physical interaction: aerial robots that don't just fly and look, but touch, push and work on the world around them. His PhD in Robotics at the PRISMA Lab (University of Naples Federico II), done as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow, received the i-PhD Grand Prix 2025. In 2026 he was named one of Le Point's Top 100 French Inventors.

Today he builds robots as products, both for education, making robotics and programming accessible to kids, and for industry, with aerial robots for the inspection and maintenance of industrial assets.

I’ve always liked building things that move, and flying machines especially. After two intense years of maths and physics in preparatory school in Angers, I joined INSA Centre Val de Loire (Blois, France) to study systems engineering.

In 2018 I spent a spring and summer at ISIR – Sorbonne University (Paris) building the Hive Tracker, a cheap sub-millimetric 3D motion-capture device that fuses IMU and optical localization. Then I left for China to do an MSc in Aerospace Engineering at Northwestern Polytechnical University (Xi’an), where my master's thesis was on fast autonomous drone landing. I also filed my first patent there, a flexible damping landing gear. In between, I spent a summer at Thales writing a ground control station for drone swarms, and hacked on side projects with friends, like an electric thrust-vectoring rocket (the eRocket). During my studies I also started an entrepreneurship project, ilo, an educational robot that kids program by simply taking a photo of the path they plan. It won the Prix Pépite for student entrepreneurs.

In 2021 I moved to Naples for a PhD at the PRISMA Lab (University of Naples Federico II), as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow in the European project AERO-TRAIN. I worked on aerial robots that don't just fly and look, but actually touch things. That meant omnidirectional drones, soft and flexible arms, and haptic joysticks so a human can feel what the robot feels. The thesis received the i-PhD Grand Prix 2025.

ilo then grew into a real company, which I co-founded and where I built the team designing and manufacturing the robots. Since then I've kept doing what I like most: turning research into robots people can actually use, in classrooms as well as on industrial sites.