Deutsche Messe is once again inviting entries for the Hermes Award, the next edition of which will be featured at Hannover Messe 2025. This is one of the world’s most important industrial prizes, and will be presented by Germany’s Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, on March 30, 2025. The deadline for companies and institutions taking part in Hannover Messe to submit their entries for this prestigious award is January 31, 2025.
Every year, Deutsche Messe honors a company with the Hermes Award in recognition of a product or solution that exhibits a particularly high degree of technological innovation. Only technology solutions which have already proven themselves in industrial practice are considered.
An independent jury chaired by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, will nominate three products each for the Hermes Award and for the Hermes Startup Award from among the submissions, and determine the respective winners from those nominees. The degree of technological innovation, benefits for industry, the environment and society, as well as cost-effectiveness and readiness for practical implementation are key criteria in assessing which entry merits the award.
The Startup 2024 went to Schunk in recognition of the company’s 2D Grasping Kit project. This application kit comprises a camera with lens, an industrial PC, AI software and an application-specific gripper. The innovative nature of this project lies in the generic, AI-based modeling of component variants and the transfer to a smaller training data set, which cuts learning times for recognition. Even under changing light, color, or background conditions, the intuitive user interface enables reliable picking and handling of randomly arranged and non-positioned parts from an inlet conveyor belt, tray or preparation table. This allows repetitive sorting or logistics tasks to be automated with little outlay.
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