Hermes Award: The nominees have been announced

The winner will be announced during the opening ceremony of the Hannover Messe on April 21, 2024 in the presence of Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The award will be presented by Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Minister of Education and Research.

Every year for more than 20 years, Deutsche Messe has honored a company with the Hermes Award during the Hannover Messe trade fair. The award recognizes a product or solution with a particularly high degree of technological innovation. Market maturity is an important criterion. Jury chairman and President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Prof. Holger Hanselka, says: "The creativity and innovative strength of the applications submitted were once again outstanding this year. The three nominated products represent the range of modern production technology issues: Automation, recycling and resource-conserving supply chains. They demonstrate the importance of manufacturing technologies for a future-oriented society. I look forward to a direct exchange with these and other innovators at the Hannover Messe."

The nominees

Bosch Rexroth, Lohr am Main
The nominated project is a system for the industrial dismantling and recycling of batteries for electrically powered vehicles. This automation solution for transporting, contacting, diagnosing, deep discharging and recycling batteries speeds up the process by a factor of 100. The discharge energy of the batteries is used directly in the process or fed into the supply network. Recycling allows up to 95% of the chemical elements to be fed back into the production process and thus reused in a targeted manner.

Schunk, Lauffen/Neckar
The 2D Grasping Kit project was nominated. This application kit consists of a camera with lens, an industrial PC, AI software and an application-specific gripper. The innovation lies in the generic, AI-based modeling of component variants and the transfer to a smaller training data set, which reduces training times for recognition. The intuitive user interface enables the reliable handling of different, randomly arranged parts from a conveyor belt, tray or supply table - even with changing light, color or background conditions. This means that recurring sorting or logistics tasks can be automated with little effort.

Siemens, Munich
The nominated product is the SiGreen CO2 management tool. This makes emissions along the entire supply chain transparent in real time and thus addressable. The system is based on real data instead of statistical averages and enables mapping along the supply chain as a basis for reducing the product carbon footprint (PCF). Sensitive data is exchanged across companies in a protected environment. SiGreen thus makes a contribution to sustainability and enables companies to verify the PCF for supply chains and products at any time.