The education and the research at ENSTA at the core of the development of IP Paris

During the press conference, updates on the Institute’s activities provided an opportunity to emphasise the central role of ENSTA’s expertise and fields of application within the Institute’s new strategic roadmap, particularly in relation to the creation of a ‘Defence and Sovereignty’ cluster.

Dedicated to Defense and Security challenges, this new centre will bring together research, training and innovation. In particular, it will unite AMIAD’s research centre, IP Paris’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Defence and Security Studies (CIEDS), the quantum campus and teams specialising in Cybersecurity, with a gradual increase in staff numbers by 2030.

Designed as a flagship centre for defence innovation, the Defence Institute will act as a link between IP Paris, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, the Directorate-General for Armament (DGA), the Defence Innovation Agency (AID) and defence industry stakeholders. It will feature shared spaces for innovation and collaboration (showroom, co-design workshop, agora, workspaces and meeting areas) designed to foster exchanges between researchers, students, industry representatives and defence stakeholders.

This transformation responds to the nation’s growing need for high-level engineers and scientific expertise, and forms part of the development of training programmes and research activities designed to meet this need.

With this in mind, ENSTA and ISAE-SUPAERO have jointly launched an MSc in Eng. in Defense and Security, the only one of its kind in France, to train engineers to design and manage major defence systems – ranging from Cybersecurity and AI to naval, aeronautical and space technologies – with nearly 100 civilian and military students set to join the program at the start of the 2026 academic year.

Another landmark announcement in which ENSTA plays a leading role is the fact that robotics is set to become a new area of excellence for the Institute, bringing together the expertise of its schools, from fundamental research to experimental platforms. The Institute already has a critical mass of 51 academic staff, the majority of whom are based in ENSTA’s laboratories, specialising in key areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence, embedded systems, computer vision, trustworthy AI and multi-robot systems.

Applications of robotics span the defence, maritime, industrial and construction sectors. These are supported in particular by the Laboratory of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence for Defence (LARIAD), a joint ENSTA-AMIAD laboratory dedicated to defence robotics, as well as by leading-edge experimental facilities, notably at ENSTA, which features an air-sea testing basin on its Brest campus and a future drone arena on its Paris-Saclay campus.