Deutsche Messe announces Hermes Award

Deutsche Messe is once again inviting entries for the Hermes Award for Hannover Messe 2025. Companies and institutions participating in the trade fair can apply until January 31, 2025. The Hermes Startup Award is also being announced again.

This year's Hermes Award will once again be presented by the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger. © German Trade Fair

Every year, Deutsche Messe presents the Hermes Award to a company whose product or solution demonstrates a particularly high degree of technological innovation. Only technology solutions that have already been tried and tested in industry are considered. This year's industry award will be presented by the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, on March 30, 2025.

An independent jury chaired by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, nominates three products each for the Hermes Award and the Hermes Startup Award. The respective winners are selected from this group. The criteria of technological innovation, benefits for industry, the environment and society, economic viability and readiness for implementation are the main criteria taken into account when assessing the award worthiness.

Award winner 2024

The Hermes Award 2024 went to Schunk. The award went to the 2D Grasping Kit project. 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.

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