Rémy Tribhout: the new hero of the microrobots

Tiny robots that can be linked and assembled into any shape imaginable: that's the Phigi project, led by engineer Rémy Tribhout. Any resemblance to the Disney character Hiro Hamada from the 2015 animated film The New Heroes is not accidental. After falling under the spell of the film's microrobots, Rémy Tribhout, then a student at Insa Toulouse, decided to do his utmost to make this most avant-garde of cinematic concepts a reality.

He developed a research project called Decabot, which in 2015 won the Alten challenge, a world leader in engineering and IT services. This award allowed him to recruit a team of four engineers at Alten's offices for six months. At the same time, he completed an internship at Thales to prepare for a Volontariat International en Entreprise (VIE) contract, which would put his dream on hold for three years as it took him to Panama, where he participated in the deployment of line 2 of the city's metro. Back in France, more determined than ever to bring his microrobots to life, Rémy Tribhout set up his own business and tried to join the CNRS RISE incubator. "I wasn't selected. I was advised to get closer to the laboratories and join a research team," recalls Rémy Tribhout. But then Covid intervened and forced him to bite the bullet.

When he was released, he returned to Toulouse with the idea of writing his thesis: "In France, if you're a doctoral student, they roll out the red carpet for entrepreneurship, whereas for engineers it's a real nightmare". A thesis supervisor, to whom he explained his project, advised him to contact the Claytronics specialist in modular robots, project manager of the Programmable Matter research project, Professor Julien Bourgeois of the FEMTO-ST Institute in Montbéliard.

French-American

The young Parisian set off for the Franche-Comté region and managed to unlock the last of the I-Site funds to form a team with Julien Bourgeois dedicated to developing the technology of "Blinky Blocks" modular robots, a kind of magical Lego that can be assembled by hand using magnets and can communicate with each other. After setting a world record by assembling 1,824 Blinky Blocks, Rémy's team was noticed by DECA-BFC and entered a pre-incubation phase in March 2021.

"It was at this point that the Phigi concept (for physique digitale) really took shape. During my first two years at DECA-BFC, I made it a point to meet professionals from various sectors (architecture, jewelry, health, design...) who might be interested, particularly in the context of prototyping, in our interactive "clay" made up of thousands of small robotic balls 3 to 4 millimeters in size, capable of self-assembling into a programmable shape from a 3D computer model".

Julien and Rémy developed a first proof of concept in partnership with Professor David Blaauw from the University of Michigan, with whom Julien Bourgeois had already collaborated. David joined the founding team of Phigi. In 2022, the startup won third place in the best business plan competition of the HEC Challenge + program: "Our technology is following the same evolution as 3D printers, which took a long time to find their market. At the moment, it's difficult to find customers. We're planning a beta version for 2027, 2028. In the meantime, to generate sales, we've been thinking about using our robotic beads for maintenance or non-destructive inspection, which doesn't require machines or equipment that are difficult to access to come to a complete stop. This is a market with high added value," says Rémy Tribhout.

Phigi, which for the time being lives only on public subsidies, "almost a million euros since the beginning of the adventure", is not yet established as a start-up, "but it is well supported: we were chosen as Deep tech Pioneers by the Parisian fair Hello Tomorrow, incubated by the CNRS RISE in Paris (a nice revenge) and winner of the Mattern Lab's call for Industry 4.0 projects..... Right from the start, I had the feeling that all the planets were aligning for our small Franco-American team of four, which we're now about to expand by hiring two more people...".